


In the Bleak Midwinter

by MKittyUltra



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1940s, Crazy Castiel, Creepy, Depression, Hallucinations, M/M, Military, No Gay Panic, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn, Soldier Dean Winchester, WW2 era
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-04
Updated: 2015-08-02
Packaged: 2018-04-02 22:11:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 26,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4075624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MKittyUltra/pseuds/MKittyUltra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean's been running for a long time when his car finally gives up the ghost in Barrow, Alaska - the USA's northern-most town - and the winter snow sets in before he can escape the town's sixty seven days of polar night. Amidst icy darkness and howling wind, Dean forms an uneasy fascination with Castiel Novak, a man of uncertain past and even less certain future. Castiel is sure there's something out there, in the darkness, and it's coming for them all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In the House, In a Heartbeat

**Author's Note:**

> The town 'Barrow' in this fic is not representative of it's real counterpart. 
> 
> The chapter titles all link to their eponymous songs. 
> 
> This work is a WIP, and will be published as and when over the next few weeks. I'll update tags and warnings as I go. If you notice any typos, errors, or inconsistencies, please do let me know as I don't have a beta reader for this fic, and whilst I endeavour to find all of the errors myself, some of them will probably slip through. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy it!

[ **_In the Bleak Midwinter_ ** ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO48grp062I&list=PLeSnHJqdxRxE02mRlSOqOiNAMg3Hhuvif&index=14)

 

_In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,_

_Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;_

_Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,_

_In the bleak midwinter, long ago._

_Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;_

_Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign._

_In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed_

_The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ._

_Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,_

_Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;_

_Enough for Him, whom angels fall before,_

_The ox and ass and camel which adore._

_Angels and archangels may have gathered there,_

_Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;_

_But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,_

_Worshipped the beloved with a kiss._

_What can I give Him, poor as I am?_

_If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;_

_If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;_

_Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart_

 

-          _Christina Rossetti_

 

 

 

 

 

 

**_[In the House, in a Heartbeat.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST2H8FWDvEA) _ **

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dean’s car broke down on the side of a cliff.

The road was narrow. There was only just enough room for him to open the door without knocking it into the rough bark of one of the massive tree that leaned over the roadside. There was only a foot between the passenger door and a sheer drop off on the other side. The bonnet of the car was either smoking or steaming. Dean couldn’t find it in himself to care. He lit a cigarette and leaned against the bonnet, shivering.

He already knew the car was a piece of junk. In all honesty he was shocked it had got him as far as it had. He had lost count of how many days it had been since he passed through a town. His supply of smokes and gas was running dangerously low, and now the car was dead. He longed for his Chevy, with her fender skirts and smart black roof.

He hadn’t seen her for over a year, now. Not since Texas. He’d had to leave her there after the spark plug went in her engine. The guy at the garage told him it’d take a few weeks for a new part to arrive. Dean had thought seriously about waiting around that long, but after a couple of days, the streets had started to bear down on him. Before the week was out he’d decided he couldn’t take it. He left her with the garage owner and took his old Ford instead. He knew he was taking a raw deal, but he hoped that his baby’s excess value would encourage her new owner to take care of her. He’d seemed like a nice guy.

Dean wrung his hands in the cold air, shoving them into his armpits. He wondered how far he’d come. The snow was pretty heavy. It was dark, but it always seemed dark up here. He swore that yesterday had only been a couple of hours long, and then he was back to driving in almost zero visibility, headlights almost useless in the heavy, downy snow that passed in front of them. He wondered if this was going to be it. He’d sit on the bonnet of this ancient pick-up truck and wait until the cold or the hunger got to him, and his body would freeze up and someone would come and find him in the spring, still solid. He liked the sound of that.

Dean hadn’t been that cold since Germany. That was almost four years ago by then. The cold was biting through his clothes and when he closed his eyes, he might have been back in that ditch, melting the frozen puddles he was trying to sleep on, feeling the mud soaking into his fatigues. He would look up at the sky, at the twinkling stars, and think about the other people across the world who’d be looking up at those same stars through their bedroom windows, or laying on soft grass holding their sweet-heart’s hand. _Hey look, baby; it’s the big dipper_.

That night the stars were hidden by a thick ceiling of snow clouds. Dean blew a new one into the frosty air.

The metal under the bonnet clicked and groaned as the heat left it. Dean felt guilty, condemning the thing to death, but there was nothing for it. He didn’t have any tools, and he certainly didn’t have any money to get someone else to fix it. And, of course, he seemed to be in the middle of nowhere.

He tossed his cigarette butt over the cliff, watching the still-lit end glow until it vanished out of sight. As he looked, though, he could make out more of them; little orange-yellow pinpricks way below him.

A town.

For some reason the sight made Dean feel disappointed. He thought he’d got to the end of the world. He’d half expected to flick his smoke straight down into the pits of hell. The town’s lights flickered brightly like glow-worms stuck on fly-paper.

A gust of wind tore at the cuffs of his coat. It was bitterly cold. Dean could feel it right to his stomach. He reached back into the car for his bourbon, but the bottle was drained. With a sigh, he went back to the cliffs edge. He wondered how far the drop was. Maybe there would be enough snow at the bottom to cushion his fall. Another gust of wind tore at him and he shivered. The town had to be less than a mile away. He stuffed his hands into his pockets, and with a last pat of sour affection on the car’s bonnet, he started to walk.

The fresh snow buckled and gave under his feet with every step he took. A trail of prints followed him down the road. The tops of his thighs ached with the effort it took not to fall forwards on the steep cliff. He wasn’t sure he’d have made it down the slope in the car alive even if the trail hadn’t been thick with snow. Tall pine trees arced from the side of the road that didn’t give off to a two hundred foot drop. The tops were coated with snow, a fine powered-sugar dusting that would have looked like it should be printed on a Christmas card if it hadn’t been so dark.

He shivered, his teeth chattering so loud and hard in his head they were making his shoulders hurt. He tried to close his mouth but the iciness of his teeth was painful against the inside of his lips. Instead he assumed an unfortunate grimace. Dean had forgotten what this kind of cold was like, the air so cold it felt like he was drinking it more that breathing, his lungs heaving as they tried not to frost over with every massive gulp of night time he forced into them.

Finally, he reached a large wooden sign. ‘You are now entering BARROW’, it said. ‘Population, 1106’. He could only make out the words because of the frosty lamp hung in front of the sign on a tall metal rod. He shuffled past the sign.

The houses were all made out of logs. The windows were all lit up. He couldn’t see through them. The light hurt his eyes. His joints seemed to be seizing up with cold. A door opened onto the street and Dean swore he could smell the heat inside of it. “Excuse me? Sir? Are you okay?” a small voice asked. Dean looked down to see a tiny person, about waist height. It took a moment to remember that children did exist, and this must be one of them.

“It’s cold.”

“Sure is, mister,” the kid said. “Mom?” he yelled back into the house. A woman appeared behind him, wearing a dressing gown.

“What is it?” she asked, running a hand over her son’s head. Dean’s entire body shuddered. “Oh, Jesus!” the woman exclaimed. “What the hell are you doing?”

The next thing Dean knew, he was swaddled in blankets next to a fire, the little boy who’d spotted him staring at him cross-legged from a rug on the floor. He blinked, his head pounding. His face itched. He was sweating under the blankets, but he still felt cold. “Dad?” the kid yelled, spiking the pain in Dean’s head. He winced.

A tall bearded man walked into the room from what must have been the kitchen. “Welcome to the land of the living, partner,” the man said with a gentle smile.

Dean looked around the room. There was a little pile of logs in the corner, next to a bucket of coal. There were heavy blankets nailed to the walls, some of them plain brown or grey but a few of them patterned with red. The fire lit the room with a bright, orange glow.

“My car,” Dean said. He frowned at the sound of his own voice. It was hoarse, barely recognisable. He cleared his throat and winced at the rawness of it. He wasn’t sure why he was bothering to ask about it. Sense of obligation, he supposed.

“It’s a lost cause,” the man said, sitting in the rocking chair opposite the cot Dean was sitting on. “I’m surprised you made it down the hill in one piece.”

“Hill?” Dean croaked. “More like a cliff.”

The man chuckled. “Well, it’s a good job Junior saw you when he did. Couple minutes more out there you might not be talking to me now.”

Dean looked down at the silent child. “Thanks kid,” he managed.

“Your face is all red,” the boy told him.

“Huh,” Dean grunted, raising a hand to his cheek. It was hot to the touch.

Barrow, it turned out, was the northernmost town in Alaska, and Benny was its sheriff. It was his blankets Dean was wrapped in, his son who had rescued him from the cold. Dean had scarely crossed the town’s boundary line and he already owed a minor his life. It wasn’t looking good. “How’d you know my car’s a write off?”

Benny shrugged. “Fuel injector’s frozen, probably. Happens to most vehicles out here unless they’re built for the cold. Most aren’t.”

“Do you know where I can get another one?”

“Why? You in a hurry to get somewhere?”  Benny asked. Dean rolled the mug of coffee he’d been given between his palms. He wasn’t, not exactly. Benny watched him, a small smile of understanding growing slowly across his face. Dean glanced out of the window. The dark street was cushioned by a soft layer of white.

“You got a name?” Benny asked, finally.

Dean ducked his head. “Dean Winchester.”

Benny nodded. “You been running a while, Dean Winchester?”

Dean sighed and sipped his coffee. He couldn’t find the energy to lie. He was too cold and too tired, and he didn’t have anything left to use to piece together some fiction.

“Figured,” Benny concluded with a nod. He looked at Dean with sympathy and wariness in his eyes. For a moment it seemed like he was going to kick Dean out, but then his smile returned. “Well. You’re stuck here now until the snow blows over. Come on; we best find you a place to stay.

Benny fitted Dean out in some of his own thick wool jumpers, and heavy coat that was made out of some kind of very soft leather, and they headed out. Dean tucked his chin into the collar of his borrowed clothes. Benny had a crocheted balaclava he had pulled over his nose. Out in the street, it was so windy that Dean could only just make out the crunch of the snow underneath his shoes.

The town was small, with only few hundred houses arranged in a couple of well-spaced streets. There was a large, long building that Benny was leading Dean towards. The battered sign frozen to the door claimed the place was a hotel, but it looked like more of a hunter’s lodge. Benny held open the door for Dean to follow him in.

The hotel’s reception was not as warm as Benny’s house had been. The man behind the counter was wearing a wool coat other his clothes. “Ah, Benji,” he said brightly.

“Gabriel,” Benny replied, tugging down his balaclava. “This is Dean Winchester. It’s his car that’s up on the ridge.”

“You can see up on the ridge in this weather? You got superpowers you aren’t telling me about?” Gabriel asked, raising an eyebrow.

“I’ve been up there this morning. The car’s a write off,” Benny explained with a shrug.

“Frozen fuel injector?” Gabriel guessed with a sympathetic nod.

“Always,” Benny sighed.

“I’ve been stuck here three years waiting for mine to defrost,” Gabriel said with a wink. Dean gulped. “Hey, kid. I’m messing with ya,” he promised.

“Dean, Gabriel Novak.”

Dean reached across the desk to shake the man’s hand. “Gabe,” Gabe corrected. “Don’t suppose you’ve got a wad of cash nestled away in all of those layers?”

“Barely had a stitch on him when we pulled him in. Junior spotted him out there when he was eating his breakfast. Good job really. If he’d been out any longer, he might have lost some limbs,” Benny joked with an easy smile. Dean gulped again.

“Figures,” Gabe sighed. “So, Dean. Do you want a room with a draft or a room with no windows?”

Dean considered for a moment. He remembered the rattle of train wheels on freshly laid tracks, his brother’s weight against him, the only glimpse of the outside world spied through the gaps in the wood. How was it that he’d come this far, and he was still stuck with Sam? “Draft,” Dean grumbled.

“See, you say that now,” Gabe said with a shake of his head. “You going to reimburse me for this good deed, sheriff?”

“I thought it might help melt some of the frost on the cockles of your heart.”

“Thought as much,” Gabe sighed. “I’m expecting a pot of stew, a la Mrs Lafitte, okay?”

Benny rolled his eyes. “I’ll see what we can do. Take care, Dean. I’m sure I’ll see you again,” Benny said, and with that, he went back out into the cold.

Gabriel gave Dean a long look-over. The hotel reception looked like it hadn’t been redecorated since the turn of the century. There was a worn chaise lounge in the corner, the wood panelling was too dark, the carpets were threadbare. Gabriel looked out of place in his fashionable jacket, with his slicked back hair. His shoulders were slumped as though all the fight had gone out of him. “So, Dean what the hell are you doing out here?” he said, finally.

Dean cracked a smile. “Drifting, I guess,” he admitted with a shrug. Gabriel narrowed his eyes.

“It’s far north to drift this time of year.”

“Maybe I should have gone in the other direction,” Dean sighed.

Gabriel studied him for a few minutes more, then stepped out from behind the desk. “Come on, I’ll show you your room,” he said, opening a door that Dean had failed to notice.

The corridor didn’t have any windows. The lamps that lit it quivered, and from the smell Dean guessed they were probably gas-powered. There were five doors and Gabriel let Dean into the second one they came to. “There we are. Room. Window. Bed. Draft,” Gabriel summarised.

Dean stepped inside. The room was small, but homely. There was a double bed in the middle, made up with heavy blankets, and a little wash basin in the corner. “If you want hot water you’ll have to come up to the house. Otherwise, the taps do work if you give them some time to think about it,” Gabe explained.

“Thanks,” Dean said, with a nod.

Gabriel shook his head. “Whatever. You should probably sleep. You look beat,” Gabe told him.

Dean sighed. He was.

When Gabe shut the door, Dean slumped onto the bed. The window was a two-foot-by-two-foot square and he had a perfect view of it from his pillows. He stared through it into the gloomy world outside. Now he’d been inside for a while, his layers felt like too much. He peeled off the coat and a few of the jumpers before wriggling his way under the bed’s numerous blankets. There was a little gas lamp on his bedside table, and he dimmed the light. Outside, there was a faint indigo glow.

A dark, vague shape passed the window as he watched. Dean frowned and blinked. The shape settled into a man, swaddled in so many layers that his outline was indistinct. The man outside tilted his head towards the sky. Dean shifted on his pillows, as though he might be able to see the sky too. He couldn't. When he looked back, the man was gone.

Dean’s eyes stayed closed longer and longer every time he blinked. As he drifted into unconsciousness, he realised he had absolutely no idea what time it was.


	2. A Tree in the Meadow

[ _**A Tree in the Meadow** _ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0kcmiEHhVs&list=PLeSnHJqdxRxE02mRlSOqOiNAMg3Hhuvif&index=3)

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Dean woke up it was pitch black outside. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and stretched, before swinging his legs out of the bed. He immediately regretted that, curling back into a ball under the scratchy blankets he was buried under. He reached out and turned on the gas lamp, sniffling. There appeared to be frost on the inside of the window. He got up, swaddled in blankets still, and skipped across the freezing wood floor until his feet were firmly shoved into his boots.

He looked at the watch on his wrist as though it hadn’t run down six months ago. There had to be someplace that said what time it was. He must have slept through an entire day. He yawned and shuffled to the wash basin in the corner of the room. He turned on the tap and nothing happened. Recalling Gabe’s advice from the night before, he stood back on his heels. He caught a glimpse of himself in the shaving mirror attached to the wall. He’d grown himself a respectably raggedy beard, and was sporting purple circles around his eyes like he’d been punched in the nose. The redness Benny’s son had pointed to on his face had confined itself just to two bright stripes across his cheekbones, and the tip of his nose.

The pipes shuddered in the wall and Dean jumped. A dribble of water came out of the tap. Dean caught it in his hands. He sipped hungrily from his palms, stomach growling. Dean had never got the weight back he’d lost in the war. He was all bone and muscle, though there was less of the latter than there used to be. He was only twenty five but he looked much older, gaunt and washed out, especially with the beard. He sighed and ran a hand over his chin.

Before he went to Germany, Dean had only had a few hairs on his chin. He wondered if Sam could already grow a beard, just because he was so much bigger than Dean ever was. At that, he looked away from his reflection and turned away from the basin. The little room was as tidy as when he arrived, bar the rustled sheets. He was tired still, but he was rested enough to go on. He pulled on the rest of Benny’s jumpers and his spare coat and went back to the reception.

A small red-headed child was sitting on the desk. “You’re Dean Winchester,” the little girl said, blinking her wide blue eyes.

“Uh, yes,” Dean agreed. He had to wonder what a kid that age was still doing up when it was dark out.

“Everyone’s talking about you,” she explained with a roll of her eyes. “Well. Except Uncle Cas. But he doesn’t talk about anything ever so I wouldn’t worry,” she said, leaning forward conspiratorially. The door behind the desk creaked open and Gabe stepped out, bringing the smell of cooking food with him.

“Ah, Dean-o,” Gabe said with a smile. “Wasn’t expecting to see you this morning.”

Dean looked at the gloomy world on the other side of the window. “I thought it was night time,” he admitted.

“You know how far north you are?” Gabe asked. Dean shrugged. Gabe sighed. “This time of year the sun’s only up for a few minutes. You want some breakfast? We’re waffling.”

Dean followed Gabe through the door, too hungry to protest the charity. They stepped right into a large, well-furnished kitchen. This must have been the house Gabe referred to the night before. There was a large, shiny stove in the corner, a waffle iron sitting on the top, hissing.

“A few minutes of daytime?”

“It’s the long night,” the little girl said. “Things go bump.”

“Ah, don’t listen to Anna,” Gabe said with a chuckle. “It’s not so bad.” Gabe lifted the waffle iron to reveal perfectly cooked waffles underneath. He plated up one for the little girl and one for Dean.

“Thanks.”

Gabe shrugged. “You look like you need it.”

The little girl poured syrup over her waffle and paused with the jug over Dean’s plate. He nodded in encouragement. She grinned. As she leaned forwards to pour, a little necklace fell out of the collar of her dress. “Thanks, Anna,” Dean said. She looked down at the necklace, cheeks going pink.

“You’re welcome.”

Dean ate a bite of his waffle and almost collapsed in relief. He hadn’t really appreciated how hungry he’d been. He tried to remember the last time he actually consumed solid food that wasn’t potato chips. He couldn’t. “These are really good.”

“They’re just about all I can cook,” Gabe admitted with a laugh.

“Sometimes we have waffles for breakfast _and_ dinner,” Anna explained.

“Once,” Gabe corrected. Anna theatrically put her hands on her hips. “Okay, twice, maybe. Three times at the absolute most.”

Gabriel sat down at the table next to Anna with a plate of his own. “So, Dean,” he said, mouth full. “How did you end up outside of dear old Benny’s house yesterday morning, give his son and wife the fright of their lives?”

Dean swallowed. “Passing through,” he said with a non-committal shrug.

“To where?” Gabe asked, with a frown. “The North Pole?”

“Are you looking for Santa?” Anna asked hopefully. Gabe ruffled her hair.

“I guess I know when I get there.”

“You realise this is town is the furthest north in the States?” Gabe sighed. For a while the only sounds were of the three of them chewing, and the clink of their cutlery against their plates. “No bounty hunters are going to tear up my brother’s hotel are they?” Gabe asked, tiredly.

Dean shook his head.

“No FBI? Cops?” Gabe quizzed. “Crazy ex-wives or girlfriends?”

Dean sighed. “I’m not in any kind of trouble.”

“People who pass through places like this are either _in_ trouble or they _are_ trouble, is what my dad would have said,” Gabe sighed. “I think he’d have identified himself with the latter, though he was actually the former.”

“And you?” Dean asked.

“Born here, not applicable,” Gabe said with a smug grin. Dean looked at Anna, who was entirely focused on her food. “Ah, well spotted.” Gabe nodded with approval. “And yes. You’re _my_ cupcake, aren’t you Anna?”

“Uh-huh,” Anna agreed, then shovelled more food into her mouth.

“I know because of the amount of sugar she can put away before she pukes,” Gabe explained. Anna grimaced.

“Icky,” she commented. Gabe chuckled.

“You know anywhere I can buy a car?” Dean asked. Gabe looked up from his plate.

“The town back over the ridge where your last ride kicked the bucket.”

“How long it take to walk it?”

Gabe clattered his cutlery down onto his plate. “Long enough to freeze right in your cotton socks.”

“How long?” Dean demanded.

Gabe scowled. “Three days walk in the snow. And you’d have to take the dog path because there’s no way in hell that car’s coming down in a hurry.”

“Dog path?”

Gabe nodded. “It’s narrower, steeper; just across the road about halfway.”

The road had been treacherous to walk as it was, and narrow enough. He shivered at the thought of going back out there. Anna smiled through a mouthful of breakfast, peering up through her orange hair. She was just like Sam had been at that age, cheery and curious. Maybe that’s what all kids were like. Dean shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I can send Benny money back for his coat,” Dean said, getting to his feet.

“Woah, where are you going?” Gabe raised his hands.

“To buy a car.”

Gabe shook his head. “You can’t go anywhere until the storm’s passed. It’ll kill you,” Gabe warned. Dean narrowed his eyes, but there was nothing in Gabe’s expression that suggested lies or exaggeration. “When it’s blown over, I’ll get Bobby to take you with the dogs,” Gabe explained.

Dean shut his eyes and took a deep breath.

“At least stay for breakfast?” Gabe offered. Dean huffed, but sat back down at the table, and proceeded to eat. Gabe stood up and went back to the stove. “More waffles?”

“Please!” Anna yipped.

“Dean-o?”

“Sure,” Dean allowed with a shake of his head. Anna grinned, her mouth full of tiny crooked teeth.

“Anna, will you take this one up to Uncle Cas?” Gabe asked. Anna jumped up and placed her hands flat. Gabe rested a plate on one of them and pressed a glass into the other. Anna hurtled up the wooden stairs in the corner of the room, thundering across the upstairs floorboards. Gabe chuckled fondly. “She’s a good kid.”

“Mm,” Dean agreed. Gabe frowned at that, but he didn’t ask. He turned back to the stove.

The kitchen was cluttered, but tidy. Stacks of pans were piled on well-loved shelves, mugs hung from hooks in the wall. The sink was full of plates that were waiting to be scrubbed clean, and from the looks of it, Gabe hadn’t been lying about waffles being the only thing he could cook. The little window over the basin looked down the street Dean had walked down behind Benny. The snow seemed to be glowing blue in to cool twilight outside. It hurt Dean’s eyes if he looked out too long.

Above a crackling fire sat in the wall next to Dean, there were three pictures. One was new-looking, of a baby in the arms of a woman whose face was cropped out by the frame. Another was of two serious looking boys, one blonde, the other dark, both wearing heavy coats and standing next to the fireplace that their picture was hanging over. The last was of a young man, his eyes wide, pale eyelashes catching the photographer’s flash. He was clearly in military gear but the photo had been taken at angle that made it difficult to tell what, exactly. “That your dad?” Dean asked.

Gabe hummed and looked up from the stove. “What?”

“The picture,” Dean explained. He was young, maybe twenty.

“God no. That’s my brother, Cas,” Gabe explained with a chuckle. He looked a little relieved, like he’d been expecting to turn around and see his father standing right there or something. “Before he shipped out,” Gabe added quietly.

Dean could have seen that himself. There was a slight smile playing at the corners of Cas’ mouth, as though he was about to start laughing at whoever was taking his picture. His eyes were wide and bright, eager with anticipation. Dean shifted in his chair. He had known that, felt the world under his feet. He could remember buttoning himself into his uniform in front of a mirror and catching sight of his reflection and feeling absurdly, chest-bursting proud. “Finally,” his dad had said, clapping him on the back. “You’re doing this family proud.”

He’d held his rifle and he’d _wanted_ it. He’d sat and joked with men who were dead now, about killing Nazis, about being a hero. Some of them had been even younger than he was. Eighteen, nineteen year olds. Dead faces in the snow. Empty skulls that once held thoughts. Slack fingers that should have held hands or bicycle bars curled around triggers.

“How long do you think it will take for the storm to pass?”

Gabe shrugged. “Few days, maybe. We don’t get the really bad ones until January.”

Dean looked out at the swirling whiteness beyond the windowpane. “It gets worse than this?”

Gabe laughed. “This is nothing.”

Dean sighed, squinting at the pirouetting flecks.

“You don’t seem like you’re going to talk,” Gabe sighed. “But I gotta ask; what are you doing up here?”

Up here. As though this wasn’t part of the lowest point in Dean’s existence. It had plummeted down here the moment everyone else in his squad got shot, and plateaued from there.

Anna skipped back into the room, then through an archway into a modest living room. There was near-silence for a moment as she fiddled with the switches on something, clicking and hissing, then the sound of a radio tuned to a dead channel, a fizzing audio-blur. “You’re not going to get any signal, it’s the storm,” Gabe told her, just as she managed to catch the crackly end of a song that Dean recognised from diners that he’d been stopping at when he’d first arrived in Alaska.

“Well done, kiddo!” Gabe called through to her.

Dean could hear the creak of sofa springs as she bounced on the cushions.  

There was a creak upstairs, a puff of dust falling in a fine mist from the ceiling as though the snow had found its way inside. Then, there were heavy footfalls on the stairs. First, a pair of tartan covered legs, and then a too big dressing gown folded tight around a form that looked like once it maybe filled it. His hair was unkempt and slept-on, and he was wearing a rough, ragged beard that reminded Dean of his own. He didn’t recognise Cas from his photograph for a moment, because his eyes were closed. Then he looked up from the floor, right at Dean, and looked right through him. Dean squirmed uncomfortably. The emptiness of Cas’ gaze was horrific. There was nothing in his face, not horror or fear or confusion. Nothing.

“Hey, baby brother,” Gabe chirped, taking the half-waffle-filled plate from Cas’ hand. “You want a coffee?”

Cas continued to not really look at Dean. He blinked slowly. “Who’s this,” he said, with no intonation.

“Dean Winchester. His car broke on the ridge,” Gabe explained brightly, pouring Cas a drink from the pot on the stove.

“Why is he here?” He still hadn’t stopped staring.

“He needed a place to stay.” Gabe pressed a mug into Cas’ hand. He looked down at it. Dean watched the steam rise against the navy of Cas’ robe. Cas turned, wordless, and started to climb the stairs again. Dean turned to Gabe, eyes wide. “I know,” Gabe sighed.

Dean looked up at where the stairs disappeared and the ceiling became the upstairs floor. “That’s the most he’s said in weeks,” Gabe admitted, offering Dean a small smile. He gulped.

When they’d got home, Sam had seemed fine for a while. There was the injury in his leg, of course, and the burns and the tip of one of his fingers that he’d lost to the cold. But he’d still been Sam. He’d talked about going back to law school, told Dean he realised now he should never have left. It had been fine. He’d get a glassy look in his eyes and Dean knew he was back there, in the snow in the mud. Dean didn’t think he’d ever be able to forgive himself when he saw Sam lying there, abandoned. It was chance that he’d come across him. Dean sometimes imagined what it would be like if he’d not walked that exact route on that exact night. He’d get home and find out Sam was dead, and Dean had spent months taking in the comfort that he was at home, safe and happy and starting to build a real life for himself in a way Dean knew he’d never be capable of himself, and it would have all been wrong.

On very bad days, Dean wished that was what had actually happened. It might have been easier that way. Dean could have got back to their empty house and fallen apart in quiet solitude. Instead he had to watch Sam fall apart instead. He knew he was running, like a coward. He knew a stronger man would have stood there and been his brother's rock. But he couldn't do it. 

Gabe put a coffee on the table in front of Dean and sat heavily in the chair next to him. Dean studied his expression, his knitted brow and the tiredness in the slope of his shoulders. Cas had looked broken. Barely recognisable. Maybe he was on the slow decline, or maybe he was getting better. Dean didn't know if Gabe was there because it hadn't got bad enough to make him leave yet, or he was just a better person than Dean was. A person who didn't up and leave as soon as things started to get difficult, the way that Dean did. 

He looked out into the swirling grey. He was almost at the top of the world and it was still was too close to home.

"The storm will be over in a few days," Gabe said again, much quieter, as though he'd overheard Dean's thoughts. "It won't keep you long."


	3. A Sign

[ _**A Sign** _ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm2whxc6X2o&index=5&list=PLeSnHJqdxRxE02mRlSOqOiNAMg3Hhuvif)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The storm went on and on. The townsfolk welcomed Dean hesitantly but warmly, and they allowed him to exist there in quiet comfort, loaning blankets and clothes and food, and Dean would force a smile though it was getting harder and harder to accept things. Gabe took him down to the bar in the middle of town, which was resolutely still open despite the whirling snow, and Dean got a guarantee from the man who owned it, Bobby, that he would take him over the ridge when the storm cleared, and then he’d be free to move on.

Dean spent afternoons chopping firewood for Gabe’s house, in exchange for food and board. Gabe was uncomfortable accepting the help, and that made Dean more uncomfortable accepting his rooms and his coffee and his water and his waffles, but he was loathe to argue when Anna was hovering around, and she always seemed to be.

As he busied himself with chopping or cleaning or watching the storm, Dean began to realise that he had a problem with his plan. He didn’t have any money. He had no vehicle to downgrade from, and he wasn’t sure there was much space left beneath the car he’d picked up last time to downgrade into. His plan, as he was beginning to realise, was not actually a plan. It was a series of unplanned events that had arranged themselves in a sequence that seemed, in hindsight, to provide a plan. If Dean were to be honest with himself, ‘events’, plural, was an exaggeration. Even just ‘event’ seemed like an overstatement. All he’d been doing was moving forwards.

He’d been ground to a halt.

“Benny say’s the storm should have passed by tomorrow,” Gabe said, marching into the kitchen, snow in his hair and his moustache. He put a box on the table, lifted out milk, bread and cheese. “With any luck we’ll see the sun one last time before it goes under the horizon for winter.”

By that night, the wind had quieted from banshee-like screeching to a low wail. During his stay, the wind had muffled the voices above him into vague, shape-less sounds, meaningless drivel to his sleep-deprived brain. Without it, the voices were clearer. Gabe spoke in a steady, calming tone. Dean still could make out the words, but he didn’t need to. Everything he needed to know was in that careful, gentle sing-song that underpinned Cas’ useless barks. “They’re coming from the left!” he shrieked. “ _Listen_ to me! They’re coming from the left!”

Gabriel said something soft and unintelligible.                                                    

“Do you think I’m stupid?” Cas yelled. Slams of metal against wood, a few wordless cries. “Balthazar? Listen! They’re coming from the _left_!”

The next morning, just like Gabe had said, the snow had stopped.

The world outside was still, flat carpets of white snow sparkling in the bluish light. The roofs of the other houses were heavy with it, like they had been covered with huge dollops of snow. Without the cloud cover, it was a lot brighter.

“Anna’s gone to find her friends,” Gabe said as Dean entered the kitchen. “I think she’d have gone mad, holed up with just me any longer,” he chuckled. It was strange, eating breakfast without the howl of the wind and Anna’s quiet chatter to fill the silence.

When they’d eaten and Dean had folded himself into several layers of other people’s clothing, Gabe showed Dean the way back to Bobby’s place, before walking further into town to buy more groceries. Dean shoved his hands into his pockets. He’d been given so many jumpers and thermal trousers but for some reason nobody had thought to give him gloves.

The hotel was a lot further out than Dean had realised, probably about half a mile, and it backed onto a beach of charcoal pebbles, exposed by steely waves that lapped hungrily at the shore. The white down on the ground was broken what looked like huge yellowed poles arcing towards the water. There were several gatherings of them, like jagged sets of teeth along the coast.

The town was settled into a narrow bay, the ridge-like hill terminating a couple of miles down the shoreline in a sheer cliff. In the other direction, the flat land looped back like a horseshoe, then rolled on and on, blistering white into the distance. Dean squinted, trying to make out some hint of terrain, but he couldn’t. If there were hills, they’d been rendered invisible. The snow had smoothed everything over.

Bobby’s bar was halfway down what Dean now understood as the town’s high street. There was a handful shops, their front windows small but crammed with goods. The bar was by far the largest structure, and probably the second biggest in the town, next to Gabe’s hotel. On the side there was a large, sheltered pen, where about ten wolfish-looking dogs circled each other, panting and yipping, treading flat the dirty floor under their paws.

The bar was empty, which wasn’t a surprise considering the time of day. Dean took off his borrowed hat and removed a couple of layers, folding them and hanging them over his arm. There was a clatter behind the bar, and a moment later a young girl stood straight, her cheeks flushed with embarrassment. “I don’t know you,” she said immediately.

“Uh. I’m here to talk to Bobby about dogs?” Dean offered uncertainly.

The girl narrowed her eyes. “Dad?” she yelled over her shoulder. “There’s a guy here wants to talk to you about dogs.”

“Oh yeah?” Bobby’s voice returned from somewhere in the room behind the bar. Dean strained his neck to look around his daughter but she moved to block his view with a sour smile.

“Should I kick him out?” she asked, folding her arms over her chest.

Bobby emerged, wiping his hands clean on the remains of an old shirt, buttons the only thing on it still white. He patted her on the shoulder. “Not yet,” he told her. “Dean,” he said. “This my daughter, Jo.”

“Pleasure.” Dean nodded. Jo rolled her eyes.

Bobby rolled his too. “You want a free ride over the ridge?”

Dean scratched the back of his neck and looked at the floor.

“Boy, I don’t have time for that kind of nonsense. It’s what you’re asking me for, correct?” Bobby sighed, throwing the rag back through the door he’d come in from. Dean nodded. “Right. None of this nancying about the point, understand?”

“Sure.”

“So long as we’re clear,” Bobby huffed.

“You sure you don’t want me to kick him out?” Jo asked sourly, but her eyes glinted with a hint of amusement.

“Nah, he’s alright.” Bobby pulled two pints of beer and slid one in Dean’s direction. Dean sat down on one of the stools and sipped the drink. It was icy cold, though Dean wasn’t surprised because the room wasn’t much warmer. “That Benny’s jumper you’re wearing?” Bobby asked. Dean looked down at the deer-patterned sweater that was his current outer-most layer.

“It is,” he agreed.

“And you’re being bedded and catered at the Novak’s place for nothing, I hear.” Bobby took a gulp of his own beer. Dean squirmed on his seat. “You don’t seem the type that accepts charity very easy.”

Dean looked at the floor between his knees.

“Way I see it, kid, you’ve run out of cash.”

Dean drank more, relishing the tightness in his chest as the cool liquid dripped through him.

Bobby sighed. “I’m not driving you over that ridge if you’re going to hotwire a car to get out of here.”

Dean looked up. “What?”

“You heard me,” Bobby said.

“I did. I’m not a crook,” Dean growled.

“You expecting someone to give you a vehicle out of the goodness of their heart?” Bobby asked sourly.

“I could…hitchhike…”

“Not many folks driving around these parts this time of year. And aside from that, the only way to go is back in the direction you’ve come from, and it doesn’t look like that’s somewhere you want to be,” Bobby explained.

“What are you saying?” Dean sighed.

“Nothing.”

Dean scowled and drained the dregs from his glass.

“What do you do, kid?” Bobby asked.

Dean looked down at his hands. What answer could he give that wasn’t damning? “Nothing.”

“Before you ran away, you must have been something,” Bobby encouraged, irritated by Dean’s response.

“A soldier,” Dean answered through gritted teeth.

Bobby was quiet for a moment. He was watching Dean with pity in his eyes that made Dean feel queasy. He didn’t deserve pity. He’d done this to himself. “And before then?”

Dean took a deep breath. He hardly let his mind wander that far back. He’d been just a kid, a high school drop out without a good grade to his name, running the streets with his friends in tow, stealing cars, taking them back, getting arrested, beating up the trashy kids who gave shit to his baby brother. His dad hadn’t been around. Dean ran their little household. Fixing fences, doors, leaks in the roof. Mowing the front lawn so the neighbours would stop asking if they were okay. Stealing peanut butter and jelly for Sam to have on his sandwiches. “Odd jobs, I guess,” he shrugged.

Bobby nodded, considering that for a moment. “You any good with a hammer?”

He’d knocked enough broken chairs together that he felt justified in saying that he was. “I’m alright.”

“You see the lean-to on your way in?”

“The dog pen?”

“That’s the one,” Bobby nodded. “Needs suring up before the real storms set in,” he explained.

Dean narrowed his eyes. “Right…” he said, pressing him to continue.

“How about you fix that for me in exchange for a ride over the ridge? I’ve got the stuff in the back. My hands are too shaky, that’s why the damn thing's falling down in the first place,” Bobby chuckled.

It had looked a little rickety, but Bobby’s hands seemed steady enough. There were probably other people in town who could have done a much better job than Dean. It didn’t sit well with him to accept it. But it sat even less well mooching off him for nothing. “Alright,” he agreed.

Bobby grinned and stood up to offer Dean his hand to shake. Dean took it. “Alright,” Bobby repeated.

Dean headed back out of the bar. He stood in front of the pen. The dogs barked excitedly, their fluffy tails wagging manic as he assessed their home. If Gabe had been serious about the storm being a small one, Bobby was probably right; the pen wouldn’t make it through the winter. He put a hand on the wooden frame, swinging his weight on it. It didn’t give but Dean was sure if it hadn’t been frozen solid the entire thing would have just collapsed right under him.

He went back inside. “Bobby?” he called.

Bobby looked back through the doorway. “You deciding you’re giving up already?”

“It might be easier if I build a new one from scratch,” Dean admitted.

Bobby frowned. “Alright. You don’t happen to know if Gabe’s still got a pen up at his place, do you?”

Dean shook his head.

They walked back over to the hotel together. The reception was dark, empty and unwelcoming. “Gabriel?” Bobby called. There was no reply.

“Maybe he’s not back from the store yet,” Dean suggested.

Bobby huffed. “Castiel? You there?” Bobby yelled, even louder than before.

There was a bang upstairs, and the floorboards above them creaked. Dean gulped. It took a few minutes, but eventually, Cas opened the door that led from the kitchen into the reception. He looked at Bobby with his dead eyes, and said nothing.

“Morning, Cas,” Bobby grunted.

Cas blinked slowly in response.

“Dean here’s going to fix up my dog pen for me, but he reckons the whole thing needs to come down. Any chance I can put the team in yours for a while, until he’s finished?” Bobby asked, speaking slowly and carefully.

Cas turned to Dean, looking him up and down with a cool, sweeping glance. “Fine,” he concluded, and he turned.

“It was nice talking to you,” Bobby said sourly as the door swung shut. He rolled his eyes. “Poor kid,” he sighed. “They left town, you know. Him and his brother,” Bobby explained. “They’re dad hauled the pair of them up here when Cas was just a babe in arms, you know. Never really had time for them. Opened this place thinking it was going to be his fast track to fame and fortune, getting rich southerners to come pay to see the polar night,” Bobby laughed dryly. “As if _that_ was going to happen.

“He split when Gabe was just eighteen, no word of an explanation. Probably realised it was a mistake to move out here in the first place. He didn't take anything with him, though. Gabe used the money he'd left to pack him and Cas up, and moved them down to the city. They sent a few postcards in the first couple of years but in all honesty, it was good to see them go. Wouldn’t have been right for them to spend their whole lives up here,” Bobby shook his head. “So, seven, eight years pass, and then Cas shows up, alone, in the middle of winter. This is two years ago now. Six months after, Gabe comes back as well, with little Anna in tow.”

“Why did they come back?” Dean asked.

“All I know is Cas fought in the war, and when they sent him home, this was where he came to,” Bobby explained.

 

//

 

That night, Dean woke with a start.

He stared up at the ceiling. Wind tore at the corners of the house. Its frame creaked and protested under the force of it. He strained his ears. Over the whispered screams of the wind, he thought he could hear gunfire. He couldn’t remember being on alert when he went to sleep. The bastards must have moved in on them after nightfall.

He sat up and reached under the bed for his rifle, but it wasn’t there. He was displaced. The room was not his bunk. There were no other men shivering beside him. The blankets were scratchy but the pillow was soft and luxurious. He was alone.

He sighed, his breath misting in the air before his face.

He heard the banging again, a regular knock, knock, knock. He got up, slipped his feet into his boots and went to the window. The snow still whirled outside, and it was so dark that beyond that he could see nothing. He shivered and shuffled back to the bed.

He lay back down and pulled his blankets up to his chin. He was safe, he knew. Sam was safe too. There were no men moving through the snow towards them, no smell of death in the air, but his body wouldn’t relax. He felt like a coiled spring, waiting to burst into action. His jaw was so clenched that the nerve in his back tooth pulsed little trembles of pain up to his temple.

It wasn’t gunfire. He knew it wasn’t. He sat up and put his shoes on again, this time lacing them up. He pulled on a jumper, too. He needed to move, to do something. He opened the door and let it swing into the room towards him. The corridor was as dark as his room had been. He shuffled out into it. He looked down towards the door to the reception. He could go through, use Gabe’s kitchen, make himself a cup of coffee. Though, Gabe probably locked the door into his actual home at night. Yes. That would make sense.

Dean stared out of the window in the corridor. He could see blurry blobs of light that were streetlamps out there. He shivered, rubbing his hands over his sleeves. There was no time in Barrow. It was always night time. Maybe it was the late afternoon. Maybe it was the early morning. Maybe it was the middle of the night. Dean could feel the cold seeping through the glass, hear the wind rattling against the panes.

“The wind’s getting worse,” a low voice said, much too close. Dean jumped, barely stifling a yelp. Cas was standing less than a foot from Dean’s side. He didn’t flinch, his gaze fixed outside the glass.

“I can’t tell,” Dean admitted.

“You spend enough time here, you start to understand it,” Cas said. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He turned to Dean and looked him up and down. “Can’t sleep?”

Dean stared back at him for a moment. “I heard something.”

“It’s the gate.” Cas closed his eyes like he was listening out for it. “Sometimes it comes free. It bangs against the post,” he whispered. Dean could hear it. It set his teeth on edge. Cas’ eyes opened wide and blue, staring out of the window again.

Dean blinked. “Ah.”

“When I hear it I hear…” he began, but his words got caught in his throat. He swallowed. Dean watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down. He shrugged deeper into his robe. “I had to come and check it was the gate,” he explained, with a little nod.

“Makes sense,” Dean said.

“Sometimes I think I hear people out there,” Cas said, distantly. He looked out, his head tilting to the side. His hands were balled into fists, trembling slightly where they protruded from the sleeves of his robe. It wasn’t fastened quite as tightly as it had been the day before, and a long v of exposed pale flesh peered out of it. Dean stared. Cas skin seemed to drink in the moonlight and shine it back. Dean followed the line of his robe up to his neck. He was as white as the snow outside. Like a ghost.

“Gabe says it’s just the wolves,” Cas whispered.

“What?”

Cas turned and looked at Dean quizzically. “The crying. He thinks it’s the wolves, howling.”

“Oh.” Dean looked out of the window again. “You think he’s wrong?” Dean guessed.

“I try not to,” Cas sighed.

They both stared through the glass a the blank canvas that stretched in front of them, the slight incline of the road up into town all but erased by the vanishing snow. In the low light, the houses were invisible, and the only thing that broke their view was the distant glow of the streetlamps, and the moon above them. Dean listened. He could only hear the wind.


	4. The Way You Look Tonight

[ _**The Way You Look Tonight** _ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9ZGKALMMuc&list=PLeSnHJqdxRxE02mRlSOqOiNAMg3Hhuvif&index=9)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next morning, Dean was being dragged down the hill towards the hotel by five determined huskies. Bobby laughed at him, happily resisting the pull of his own. “You just got to accept they’re going to try and yank your arm off,” Bobby explained, raising his voice so Dean would hear him over the increasing distance between them.

“But I like having arms!” Dean called back.

Bobby laughed louder. “Embrace it!”

“I won’t be able to if I don’t have any arms!”

One of the dogs decided to come to an abrupt halt, and Dean’s left arm was jerked behind him, the right straining forwards as the others tried to carry on. He was sure it was kind of medieval torture. Pain erupted in his shoulder and he dropped the stalling dog’s leash, falling face first into the snow. Reflexively his right hand released too, and he heard a chorus of barking erupt as the dogs broke free.

“EY!” Bobby yelled. The scrabbling on the snow that had been growing fainter grew louder again. One of the dogs nudged Dean’s ear with its cold, wet nose. “Good girl, Sal,” Bobby said, patting the dog’s side. Dean sat up with a groan. His face stung with cold. “You idiot,” Bobby grumbled, shaking his head.

“I don’t do dogs,” Dean muttered, dusting off the front of his coat and heaving himself upright.

They were almost at the hotel. The door to the reception room was open, and Cas was standing in it, smiling. Dean grinned back, trying to ignore the spike in blood pressure he felt when he saw Cas’ face. He was pretty when he smiled, Dean decided. He looked different in the almost-sun of the morning. The wind had died down to an only near-deafening speed, and Cas’ hair was ruffled pleasantly by it.

He looked at Dean for a long time. They were still too far away for Dean to make out the blue of his eyes, but he could picture it all the same. He hadn’t seen him in that light though. Cas tilted his head to the side, like he’d thought of something interesting, and then gripped the edge of the door frame. He half-doubled over, clinging to the wall as though it was an effort to stand up.

“Dean? You leaving me to the dogs?” Bobby asked, gathering the snow-coated leashes from the ground as the dogs milled around useless like they were at some kind of mother’s meeting, looking up at Bobby expectantly, waiting for him to tell them it was alright to move off again.

Dean cracked a smile. “Whilst I’ve still got arms to spare?”

When he looked back at the doorway, Cas was gone. They gathered the dogs up again and trekked the last few yards to the house. It was easier now Bobby had yelled at them a little. They kept almost pausing and looking back at Dean like he might give them treats or something.

“Gabriel?” Bobby called through the door.

Gabe appeared a moment later, still buttoning his coat. “I’m coming!” he huffed.

“Can we go straight round?”

“Yeah, gate’s open, I think,” Gabe explained. He rushed forward and took some of the leashes from Bobby. “Let’s go.”

The hotel’s pen was a lot sturdier than Bobby’s looked. Gabe slid the bolt aside and the walked the dogs in. Bobby and Gabe unharnessed them as Dean stood uselessly in the doorway. “I don’t mind you leaving them up here,” Gabe told Bobby. “It’s not a problem, long as you’re not expecting me to feed them.”

“No. I’ll send stuff up with Dean, you can cater them,” Bobby said with a nod. Dean looked at the dogs. Each of them was almost waist high. They were panting and yipping, sniffing out their new temporary home. “You’ll have the new place fixed up in no time, I’m sure,” Bobby said quickly, waving his hand as if to cast the compliment aside as he said it.

Dean cleared his throat.

Gabe was fussing one of the dogs, the rust coloured one that had sniffed at Dean when he fell. “That’s Sal. She’s in charge.”

Sal barked as if in reply, and Gabe jumped, startling out of his crouch and landing on the snow with a thump. Bobby laughed at him.

“That’ll do, old man,” Gabe grumbled, getting to his feet.

“Still not got your snow legs back,” Bobby sighed with a shake of his head.

Something flashed across Gabe’s face, anger or bitterness or something, and then vanished. “Apparently not,” he agreed.

They locked the dogs in, sliding across two bolts and flipping them down. Sal yipped as they walked away. “Ah,” Bobby sighed. “Feel bad leaving them,” he chuckled.

Gabe clapped him heavily on the back. “They’ll be fine,” Gabe assured him.

Dean intended to spend the afternoon pulling down Bobby’s pen, but spent a good deal of it chipping frozen dog shit off the layer of compacted snow on the pen’s floor. In the end, he only had a chance to pull off some of the chicken wire on the side before the twilight was too gloomy for him to see anything at all, and he wound up cutting his hand on a freed barb of it. He traipsed back to the hotel, a rag donated by Jo wrapped around his hand, dripping.

He knocked on the kitchen door, but there was no answer. “Gabe?” he called. Still nothing. He could try and make do with the stuff he had back in his room, but dressing his injury would mean tearing up some of his clothes or his bed linen, and seeing as none of that actually belonged to him, it felt like a bad idea.

Cas opened the kitchen door. When he saw Dean’s hand, his usually pale complexion went ashen. “What happened?” he asked, his voice tight.

“Cut on the chicken wire on Bobby’s dog pen. You got a first aid kit?”

Cas was still staring at Dean’s hand. “It’s bleeding,” he said breathlessly.

“I can handle it,” Dean told him, firmly. Cas looked up, wide eyed. “I just need some bandages.”

Cas nodded and went to the sink. Dean walked in, slumping at one of the chairs by the kitchen table. His face was flushed from the sudden heat of the room. Cas placed a small box of medical supplies on the table. “Raise your arms,” he commanded.

“What?”

“Do it,” Cas insisted. With a frown, Dean obeyed. He felt something cold brush against his stomach, then all of his layers – three jumpers, a shirt, and Benny’s coat – were all lifted over his head. He was sat in his vest, tucked into his trousers. It had embarrassingly large circles of sweat, marked over even larger yellow stains. His skin was shiny in the lamp light. Cas took Dean’s hand in both of his, turning it gently as he unwound the rag.

The gash was deeper than Dean had realised, stretching right from the root of his index finger all the way to his wrist on the opposite side of his palm. “You didn’t clean this,” Cas noted. It wasn’t a question. His eyes flicked up to Dean’s, and he offered him a small smile.

Cas brought over a small bowl of water and a cloth. He manhandled Dean’s hand to an inch from the bowl, and began dabbing at it delicately.

“I could do that,” Dean grumbled.

“Shut up,” Cas sighed in reply, not looking up from Dean’s hand. When he’d finished, the wound was still dribbling a little blood, but it didn’t look as hellish any more. Now he’d warmed up it hurt whenever he flexed his fingers. Working on the pen would be more difficult tomorrow. “You need stitches,” Cas announced.

Dean’s guts twisted. “I’m sorry?”

Cas cleared his throat, glancing up from Dean’s hand. “I know what I’m doing.”

Dean frowned. Cas reached for the box and took out what he needed. Dean had rudimentary stitching skills. He braced himself for ever needle pinch, but Cas worked quick and light. When he was done, Dean had six stitches neatly holding together his palm. Cas hid them beneath a strip of white gauze. Dean smiled and gave his fingers a wiggle, hissing through his teeth when that hurt him. Cas stood up, wiping his hands on the towel he’d draped over his knee whilst he’d been stitching. “You a doctor, or something?”

Cas flinched. “Medic,” he said, quick and empty. He turned to Dean, but his eyes were closed. “There’s Tylenol in the box, if it hurts.”

Dean huffed. “Tylenol?” he protested. Cas frowned and opened his eyes. “You got any whiskey?”

This seemed to amuse Cas. He went to the sink, opened the cupboard to reveal several shining bottles of the stuff. He pulled one out by the neck and set it on the table, grabbing two glasses from by the sink. Dean poured them each a drink, lifting the bottle with his good hand. “Do I have any whiskey,” Cas muttered, sipping his drink and shaking his head minutely.

Dean knocked his back in one. Cas watched silently, raising an eyebrow at Dean’s resultant splutter. “Spicy,” Dean said.

Cas smiled. “Best kind.”

Dean looked up at him through his eyelashes. Cas’ tongue flashed across his lips, leaving them glistening. Dean stared at them. Cas was watching him too. Either that or Dean was imagining it. He’d misjudged this kind of thing before. It got him a few nasty bruises and even a couple of scars. Cas took a deep breath, eyes flitting back and forth between Dean’s, like he was trying to figure him out. Dean kept his gaze steady on Cas’ lips. His hand throbbed. “Where’s Gabe?”

“He and Anna are visiting the LaFittes.”

Dean looked around the dark, empty kitchen. “How long will they be out?”

“Hours,” Cas said. His voice was closer than Dean anticipated. He turned back to him. Cas had leaned forwards, shifting his body nearer to Dean’s so that he could actually feel the heat coming off him. The breath caught in Dean’s throat. Cas met his eye with a slight frown that was either a challenge or an invitation.

Dean reached for his glass, but when he raised it to his lips he realised that it was empty. He moved away from Cas and filled both their glasses again, his heart pounding in his chest. He knocked his drink back in one and slumped back into his chair again. Cas was on his feet. He slammed his empty glass down on the table.

“There’s hot water in the boiler,” Cas said, his voice harsher, more rugged than before. He looked at Dean with desperate eyes. Dean looked back. “You look like you could use a bath.”

Cas started to walk up the stairs. Dean trailed after him, pausing on the first one as it creaked under his foot. Cas looked back. “Come on,” he said, quietly.

Dean followed him up, to a small corridor with several doors leading off it. Cas opened one and let it fall wide, and then stepped inside. By the time Dean had followed him, Cas had lit two gas lamps, both standing on the floor beside a large, claw footed bath. The pipes blossomed from the wall, painted cream like the tiles. The room had no windows. Cas started running water, and the sound of it hitting ceramic filled Dean’s head. He could smell the steam, warm and fresh. Unthinking, he pulled off his stale vest in anticipation.

Cas watched, sat on the lip of the bath, his eyes wide. They trailed down Dean’s body, lingering first on the dog tags he still had around his neck, and then on the puckered scar on his hip where a bullet had glanced off him. Dean curved his shoulders around, shrinking in on himself. He didn’t want to turn around and let Cas see the long marks across his back. “Auf den knien!” the man had screamed. Dean fell forwards, knowing instinctively what he’d said. They had Sammy held back by his arms. Dean could still hear him screaming his name.

“Dean?” Cas voice snapped Dean back into the bathroom. Cas had stood, and was now just a few feet away from him, hand poised as though he were about to rest it on Dean’s cheek. “You’re shaking.”

Dean lifted his uninjured hand and saw that he was. He laughed nervously. “Must be the cold,” he said uselessly.

Cas dampened his lips again. “Don’t get your bandages wet,” he urged.

“I won’t,” Dean promised, and then he had to look away, before Cas’ eyes peered past his pretences again, and he did something inadvisable.

Cas hummed quietly, and then walked out of the room. For the first time, Dean noticed he moved with a very slight limp. Probably because Cas usually moved a lot slower than he did then. For a moment, the air in the bathroom still fizzed with static like the electric of Cas’s eyes had saturated the room. Dean breathed in deep. The hairs on his arms were standing on end, and it had little to do with the temperature.

When he’d gathered the momentum, he went and pushed the door to. There was no lock, but Dean could see a rectangle of unvarnished wood, two dark holes from screws where one seemed to have been recently removed. He smoothed the pad of his thumb over the puckered wood, and went to stand by the tub.

He trailed his hand through the water. It was deliciously warm. He couldn’t stop the delighted moan that poured out of his lips. He had to fight with the button on his trousers, struggling to undo it one handed, but then he was kicking them across the tiles along with his thermals and three pairs of now-crusty socks. It was the first time Dean had been naked in a long while. He put his foot into the water and the heat of it almost hurt, but he gritted his teeth and got right in anyway. His skin immediately reddened in the warmth, his body tingling all over. He closed his eyes and leaned back, feeling the water line creep slowly up his chest. When it got to his nipples, he shut the tap off with his toe, and sunk completely under the water.

The movement caused an overflow. Muffled through the water, he heard some of it slosh onto the tiles. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest, that old tattoo; I am, I am, I am. He breathed out, bubbles rising and bursting loudly as they breached the surface. The heat got to him everywhere, filling his nostrils and his ears.

The door creaked open and Dean resurfaced fast, gasping. He peered around. Cas was standing in the doorway, holding a towel. They stared at each other.

“Soap,” Cas said quietly. He put the towel down on a chair that Dean hadn’t noticed was by the door, and then walked towards him. He wasn’t looking at Dean’s face. His eyes were fixed lower, and sweeping further down with every step he took towards him. Dean lifted a hand out of the water. Cas put the soap in it, then frowned. Dean looked up at the sopping bandages.

“Oh.”

Cas shook his head. “I’ll fix it,” he promised. He met Dean’s gaze just for a few seconds, then he left again, even faster than before, limp even more pronounced. Dean released the breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding.

Cas didn’t come back. When Dean got out of the bath, he found a pile of clothes outside the door, a fresh bandage folded neatly on top of it. “Cas?” he called. Nobody replied. Dean clumsily wound the bandage on, and pulled the worn jeans and clean shirt that had been left for him onto his body. It was strange to wear fresh clothes. The smell of them was unfamiliar, but comforting. “Cas?” he tried again. Still nothing.

There was a knife slice of yellow light cutting across the hall from the gap under one of the doors. Dean could hear something, a faint knocking sound, the creak of bed springs, the soft drum of fingers against wood. He thought about going to Cas' door, knocking lightly, opening it wide. Cas would look up at him, with those eyes - too blue - and those lips - so pink they really ought not to be allowed - and Dean would close the space between them. Or maybe he'd open the door and Cas would be curled in the corner of his room, hands knotted into his hair, rocking back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. 

Dean tucked his dog tags under the new shirt. No. He wouldn't go to him. 

“Thank you,” he called. He looked at the light for a few moments more, and then sighed. He went back downstairs.


	5. Falling, Catching

[ _**Falling, Catching** _ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHBa2ANs0fo)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Progress on the pen was slower than Dean thought it would be.

His injured right hand, which was unfortunately the dominant one, could only be used to hold things steady. There were only four hours or so in everyday where the light was good enough for Dean to be working, which slowed progress even further. He’d been at it for almost a week by the time he’d finally finished tearing the old pen down. Soft white clouds were rising on the peachy horizon.

Bobby came outside with a large mug of coffee. “Last day of sun tomorrow,” he said as Dean took a sip.

“What do you mean?”

“You must have noticed, the sun just sort of peeks in on us at the moment?” Bobby asked. He had noticed. It appeared over the vast expanse of whiteness that rolled away from the town, crawled in a semicircle, then set again within about five minutes. “Well, tomorrow is the last time it’ll actually show its face. That’s it for the winter.”

Dean balked. “Total darkness?”

Bobby laughed. “Not quite. For a week or so the twilight’s bright enough to be useable for three, maybe four hours. Then it gets less. There’s only a few days where it’s completely dark the whole time, right in the middle. Then it starts again,” Bobby explained with a shrug. “Like anywhere, I guess. Except instead of the days just getting shorter, up here they disappear altogether for a while.”

They both stared up at the peachy sky. A gust of wind so strong that it felt like someone had knocked into him, running at full speed, almost sent Dean’s coffee flying. A few drops spilt over the edge of the mug, dripping to the snow, melting dark caves like tiny rabbit warrens in a hillside.

“Hey, Bobby?”

“Yeah?”

Dean turned to him. Bobby was still looking up at the sky, squinting slightly. “You’re not from around here,” Dean said. It wasn’t a question. He hadn’t noticed it the first few times they’d spoken, because Bobby’s accent wasn’t that different from his own and fell very easy on his ears. It wasn’t until Gabe had swung by on his way back from whatever he did in town during the days and the three of them had all spoken together that Dean noticed Gabe’s voice was the one that sounded out of place, not his own.

Bobby sighed and looked down at his snow covered boots, then up at Dean’s face. “I ended up here same as you,” he answered with a smile. “Drove until I couldn’t anymore.”

Dean nodded. The peachiness of the sky was quickly fading into navy blue, the clouds looking less like cotton and more like clouds of grey smoke. “Fuel injector freeze?” he asked, with a grin.

Bobby chuckled. “It’s always a frozen fuel injector,” he reminded him.

Dean looked at the cut up patch of snow where the dog pen had stood. “I’m not going to finish this in a couple of weeks,” he sighed.

Bobby shrugged. “You might’ve, if you’d not hurt your hand.”

Dean flexed his fingers, the bandage tight on his palm. The skin beneath it still remembered the warm touch of Cas’ fingers. Dean hadn’t seen him since he’d walked in on him in the bath. He’d heard him, of course. The wind hadn’t been loud enough to drown out his nightmares.

“The dogs are safe up at the Novak’s,” Bobby assured him with a smile. “There’ll be plenty of time to knock them a new place together in the spring.”

Dean looked out across the snow. Something moved, too small and brief for Dean’s eye to catch. He shuddered. “I guess,” he allowed, grudgingly.

Bobby clapped a hand on Dean’s shoulder. “Thanks for getting it this far.”

Dean tried to smile but was sure it came out as more of a grimace. “No trouble.”

"You okay kid?"

Dean was still looking out across the snow. It wouldn't settle under his eyes, but the more he tried to make out exactly where the movement was, exactly, the more he began to question there was anything there at all. "Yeah, I'm good," Dean told him, absently. 

“I’m not expecting you to overwinter here,” Bobby reassured him.

Dean felt the tension shake out of him immediately. Bobby laughed. “Don’t look too eager,” he warned.

He grinned. "Sorry."

Bobby shook his head. “It’s fine, kid.”

Dean turned from the writhing but not-writhing snowscape towards the craggy ridge in the other direction. If he squinted, he could just about make out the car he'd abandoned up there, half-hidden under snow. 

“Maybe it’s time to turn around,” Bobby said quietly.

“Maybe."

“I can take you over the ridge the day after tomorrow. I ain’t missing a chance to get a free bowl of Mrs Lafitte’s stew.”

Dean laughed. “Thanks, Bobby.”

Bobby waved Dean’s gratitude away with his hand. “Eh, get out of here, kid.”

“I don’t need telling twice,” Dean said with a grin. He handed Bobby back his mug and walked back down to the hotel. Gabe wasn’t there, and he’d passed Anna playing in the snow with Benny’s kid on the way down.

He took off a few layers and headed to the kitchen, less uncomfortable now about grabbing himself a cup of coffee than he was when he arrived. When he opened the kitchen door, he jumped out of his skin, because Cas was standing right behind it.

“I heard something,” Cas said. His eyes were wide. Dean could see he was breathing too fast. Every now then he heard a little hitch in Cas’ throat.

He’d seen this before, with Sam, in the beginning. In the middle of the night he’d get out of bed. The creaky floorboards in the hall would wake Dean up and he’d go out to find Sam standing there, silent, sometimes completely naked. “I heard them,” he’d say. The big window in the hall would shine the moonlight down his body, make him the same colour as the whitewashed walls. “They’re coming.”

“It was just me coming in,” Dean managed to say, the words grating against the lump in his throat. Cas finally met his gaze, blue eyes still wild with horror.

“No. Before.”

Cas had his hands on the back of a chair. His knuckles were white, fingers purple. His arms were shaking. “What did you hear?”

“Screaming,” Cas said, without missing a beat.

Dean listened. The wind was picking up again. He could hear Bobby’s dogs scratching around outside. Every now and then one of them barked, the sound abrupt and jarring. “Probably the dogs whining, or something,” Dean told him.

Cas shook his head. “You didn’t hear it,” he said. “It wasn’t dogs.”

Dean frowned.

Cas’ breathing had got even faster. He was leaning forwards, staring past Dean now, his lips parted just a little and cracked by his desperate breaths. “Cas,” Dean said softly. “I think you need to sit down."

Cas’ arms trembled and he flinched. He made a small, animal sound. Dean’s hackles raised, and he braced himself. He could walk away from this but he couldn’t make himself turn. With Sam, there had been a switch in his head, and if you pushed him too far it would flick on to defence mode, and whilst he looked like his limbs were so long and thin they’d snap in a stiff breeze, Sam sure could pack a punch. Years of Dean’s advice to him would come tumbling forwards. Every time Sam bared his teeth at him, Dean would hear his own words echoed in his ears. “If they’re scaring you, Sammy, don’t be a pussy! Punch them before they punch you!”

Dean had taught him that fear meant fight. That was why Sam decided to follow Dean into the war anyway, rather than staying at Stanford and getting his degree. He’d been afraid. Hadn’t Dean told him, over and over, that if he was afraid the way he should fix it is by fighting the thing that was scaring him? Dean swallowed the bile rising in his throat, remembering the taste of his own blood in his mouth. He’d never hit Sam back. Never.

Cas was much smaller than Sam was. Dean was sure if he tried anything it’d be pretty easy to keep him from hurting himself. Or Dean. In that order.

“Cas,” Dean said, more firmly this time. “Sit down.”

He did, so fast that the chair legs scraped along the floor. “Don’t hurt me,” he whimpered, his eyes screwed shut.

Dean’s internal organs seemed to fall somewhere to the region of his ankles. “What?”

Cas didn’t open his eyes. “Please,” he whispered.

“Fuck,” Dean hissed. Cas cringed back at the word. That was his defence? “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Cas shrank further in on himself at the words, as though every one of them was doing exactly what they promised not to do. There was a loud voice at the back of Dean’s head telling him to walk away, right out of the hotel, across the beach, into the icy water, let it numb him to the core until the feeling of abject horror that came in waves with every tremble of Cas hands was gone with the last thoughts in his head and beats of his heart. Another voice was angry. It wanted to him break things. The conflict had him frozen to the kitchen floor, staring, silent.

Cas whimpered.

It snapped Dean out of his reverie. There were other instincts beneath the tackle-him-to-the-ground-and-keep-his-arms-to-his-sides ones, but they were buried deep. They surfaced hesitantly. Dean reached out slow, careful not to startle Cas as he moved towards him, then put a hand on his arm. Cas squeaked at the touch, but he seemed to be frozen like a deer in the headlights, his eyes staring into Dean transfixed.

Dean pressed his hand flat against Cas’, rubbing over the flannel of his robe. “See; not hurting,” Dean pointed out.

Cas blinked and drew a shaky breath. “Please don’t,” he whispered.

Dean put his other hand on Cas’. “I wouldn’t,” he promised.

“I’m sorry,” Cas breathed, hardly making any sound.

Dean shook his head. “It’s alright.”

Cas shuddered hard, moving suddenly to grab a fistful of Dean’s jumper. He clung desperate, gasping. For a moment Dean was too stunned to respond, then he looped his arms around Cas’ shoulders. A sob tumbled out of him. He clung tighter. “I’m sorry, please, please,” Cas gasped. Dean froze and pulled back. Cas cried out as Dean’s clothes were torn out of his grasp. He stayed hunched over, his fingers reaching.

Dean moved closer to Cas again and he curled his arms to his chest. “I won’t hurt you,” Dean promised again. Cas’ face crumpled, tears splitting down his cheeks. He didn’t believe what Dean was saying. It wasn’t going in.

Dean sat in the chair next to him. Cas blinked.

Dean knew battle fatigue. He’d seen it. Hell, some nights when he woke up and thought he’s back on his way out of Berlin in a cattle train, he thought he’d felt it, not that he indulged that consideration for very long. He’s seen men who’d whimper and cry at the sound of a ceiling fan, thinking it was chopper blades above them. Sam couldn’t sleep through the night without being wracked by gruesome nightmares that slowly chipped away at his sanity until there was nothing left. When Cas had come downstairs, when he’d heard the gate knocking, it seemed the same. It was recognisable because it was about battle.

Dean stole a glance at him. He was staring. When would Dean’s brain be able to record the blue of Cas’ eyes well enough that they wouldn’t knock the breath out of him anymore? A stirring at the pit of his stomach reminded him that he might not want to know. Cas’ breathing had almost returned to a semblance of normality. Dean looked down at his hands, knotted in his lap. It took a lot of will power not to look up at Cas again, but he knew somehow that it was exactly the wrong thing to do. So he stared at his hands, and he waited.

Eventually, Cas shuddered and his body finally seemed to relax. Dean looked up at him. His eyes were closed. He had his hands on the back of his neck. Dean got up and returned a moment later, placing to glasses of whiskey on the table. Cas opened his eyes at the sound of the glass hitting the wood, eyes flicking up to Dean’s for the briefest of moments, but he said nothing. He lifted one of the glasses gingerly to his lips.

Dean sat back down and drank his own glass in one.

Cas sniffed, rubbing at his eyes with the sleeve of his sweater.

Dean looked around at him, cautious, worried he might set him off again.

Cas smiled, a sad, tiny thing, barely a shadow of the grin that had graced his face when he’d seen Dean fall in the snow. “Thanks for the whiskey,” he said quietly.

“It’s your whiskey,” Dean reminded him, flashing a smile of his own.

Cas sighed. “Yes,” he agreed. He took another sip, then noticed Dean’s empty glass. “Do you always drink so fast?”

Dean shrugged. “I guess.”

“You trying to get out of here fast?” Cas asked.

Dean lifted his chin, measuring Cas against him. He was watching Dean again, his gaze steady. His eyes were almost half-closed. “No.”

Dean hadn’t noticed the wind until the gate clanged loudly, breaking free of it’s poorly fitted bolt. Cas jumped, and Dean studied him in case he’d been set off. “I’m fine,” he whispered, like he knew exactly what Dean was thinking.

“You sure about that?” Dean asked, more concern in his voice than he should have allowed.

“Actually, I’m entirely certain of the opposite,” Cas admitted with a small smile. The wind yowled outside, and Cas clenched his jaw.

Dean poured himself more whiskey and this time took an exaggeratedly slow sip. Cas quirked a brow. “I’m in no hurry,” Dean said again.

Cas sighed. “I’m sorry about this.”

“I’ve seen worse,” Dean assured him.

Cas grimaced. “You’re a soldier.”

Dean shifted uncomfortably. Cas’ noticed, sitting up a little straighter as he finished his drink.

“I saw your dog tags,” Cas reminded him.

Dean smirked. “Not all you saw.”

Cas laughed a single, quiet note. “No.” The smile died on his lips. “Your hand?”

“I bandaged it myself. It’s fine.”

Cas reached towards him, pausing to gauge Dean’s reaction for permission. Dean nodded minutely. Like the other night, Cas took Dean’s injured hand in both of his. He ran the pad of his thumb of Dean’s knuckles and he hissed at the contact against his raw skin. “Don’t you have any gloves?” Cas asked.

“Huh?”

“Your knuckles are cracked form the cold,” Cas pointed out.

Dean peered at the red skin, giving Cas his other hand whilst he examined them. “I guess you’re right.” 

Cas found the same cracks on his left hand, too. “Hmm.” He pushed up Dean’s sleeve, again flickering his attention up to Dean’s face momentarily to make sure he wasn’t over-stepping any marks. He wasn’t. He traced the lines on Dean’s palms, pressing gently against his callouses.

“Cas…” Dean murmured, not meaning too. Cas glanced up again, concern melting away when he met Dean’s gaze. “Your hands are soft,” he muttered, lamely.

Cas looked back down at them. “Not really. Just softer than yours. I sewed together more bullet holes than I made.”

Dean withdrew his hand.

Cas pursed his lips. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Right.”

“No, I really didn’t,” Cas said, softly. Dean studied his expression. He was pretty in this light too, Dean realised, much to his annoyance. He ought to leave. Instead, he put his hand back on the table.

“Were you in the army?”

Cas’ gentle fingers froze for a fraction of a second. “Marines.”

Dean turned quickly to him. He’d heard stories about the Pacific arena. “God.”

“Hmm.”

“And before?” Dean asked.

Cas’ fingers stopped completely. Dean turned to face him fully.

The kitchen door opened and a gust of cold air cut between them. Cas dropped Dean's hand and he snatched it back into his lap.

“Cassie?” Gabe said, surprised but delighted.

“Gabriel,” Cas replied, offering his brother a small smile.

Gabe’s gaze flitted between the two of them. “Who’s up for waffles?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ehe, sorry about that. I'm not 100% about this chapter, but I think it's because I'm having a bad day.


	6. I'll Be Seeing You

[ _**I'll Be Seeing You.** _ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDlKb2cBAqU)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The townspeople gathered on the beach behind the hotel, peering out over the snow, waiting.

It was the grey-blue of pre-dawn twilight. It was almost midday. In a moment, the sun would appear for less than a minute, and then it would be gone. For sixty seven days.

Bobby’s dogs ran up and down the shore line. Anna and Ben threw black stones into the steely water, darting back to the snow line when the foamy wave almost touched their thick boots. Other kids did the same, grouped in little threes and fours, broken by age divides of three, four years, all smiling conspiratorially as the adults chatted and stared out at the horizon.

The air was unnaturally still for what Dean had come to expect of Barrow. For the first time, he could hear the waves against the pebbled beach, and the children squealing at the water. The gate that separated the beach from the town hung open but still.

Dean was smoking a cigar. Gabriel had given it to him after Bobby caught him trying to offer it to Jo. He puffed out a small cloud into the air and watched it dissipate. Gabe offered him a hip flask and Dean took a sip, recognizing the bite of the whiskey that was kept under the sink. “Warms the soul, don’t it?” Gabe sighed.

“It does that,” Dean agreed.

“You boys drinking already?” Bobby asked, shaking his head, as though he hadn’t offered Dean a pint of beer at nine in the morning the first time they’d met.

The crowd began to bubble enthusiastically like a bunch of hens about to lay their eggs all at once, and Dean, Bobby and Gabriel all looked out over the snow, too. The sun crested the horizon, a bright point of spectacular white. It glimmered and shook inconstantly as it rose, fast, just a millimeter into the sky. The snow was lit brilliant white and Dean squinted so his eyelashes shielded his eyes.

Some of the kids cheered and it set off the dogs barking. The adults stood in awed silence, hands jammed into armpits, noses buried into collars for warmth. For a blinding moment, it was daytime in Barrow. Then, the sun was gone.

Dean blinked, weird blue spots blurring his vision.

“You going to cry, Dean-o?” Gabe asked with a laugh. Bobby clapped him on the shoulder.

The crowd started to move off, but Dean was still staring at the place the sun had been, it’s presence still marked by the squiggles in his eyes. “You coming up to Benny’s?” Bobby asked him.

“I’m going to stay here a moment,” Dean heard himself answer, but he wasn’t sure why.

Soon, he was standing on the beach alone.

The tiny day had made Dean feel very small. It was such a fleeting glimpse of the sun, against the darkness that he knew was to follow it. Nobody else had seemed as moved as Dean was trying not to be. He supposed it was because they’d all seen it before. Of course, Dean had got used to the sun not really rising there in Barrow but it was different knowing its inhabitants wouldn’t be seeing it again for months.

A gust of wind tugged at his clothes and he breathed the icy sea air in deep. He looked out across the dark waves, taking the burned image of the sun in his eyes with him. There were hundreds of trails of footprints, small and large, human and dog, all crisscrossing on the beach. A way towards the ridge there was an old, rickety-looking boardwalk, meandering into the water out to where it was deep enough for boats.

The strange curved white tree stumps clawed just barely out of the snow around him. He bent down to touch one. It didn’t feel like wood.

“They’re bones,” said a familiar gravelly voice. Dean stood up and turned to see Cas. He was dressed. Dean almost didn’t recognise out his robe and pyjamas. He seemed larger, padded out for the cold, but despite that Dean could tell his clothes were far too big for him. He was standing a few feet from Dean, his breaths huffing out little clouds of mist. He wondered how long Cas had been standing there, watching. Had he seen the last of the sun?

Dean remembered the cigar in his hand. It appeared to have been blown out. He snubbed on the ground just to be sure and tested its damp end with his finger. He put it in his pocket.

“Bones?” he asked. Dean was imagining huge bears with bared teeth; dragons curling through the sky with frost on their scales.

“Whale bones,” Cas explained. He pointed to Dean’s left. One of them was splintered. “Harpooned.”

Dean ran his fingers over the split. Suddenly the configuration of the strange ivory stumps made sense. They were ribs. The creatures they belonged to must have been huge.

“People used to come here to hunt them in the summers.” Cas had come to stand right next to Dean, now. “They’d drag their carcasses in from way out at sea.” He nodded towards the black water that stretched on before them. It didn’t look like it should be able to sustain life. “They’d make a lot from the blubber. Sell the meat to people in town for a low price so none of the locals complained.” Cas smiled as though fondly remembering an amusing incident. “It was disgusting,” he explained, when he spotted Dean’s intrigued expression.

“Don’t they come anymore?”

“Some of them, but far less, now,” Cas heaved a sigh. “Perhaps, when the war is a memory, there will be more of them again.”

Dean smoothed the massive bone. “It’s kind of sad.”

“I think so.” Cas reached smoothed his own bare fingers against it, too. “The whalers did stay in the hotel, though. It was good for business, if nothing else.”

Dean huffed. “Good for business doesn’t mean anything,” he grumbled.

Cas frowned. “No,” he agreed.

They looked at one another for a long while, the sound of the wind and the waves around them, the twilight deepening every second. Dean thought he spotted something over Cas’ shoulder and squinted. Cas turned too.

Like the day before, Dean couldn’t actually _see_ anything in the snow. It was like whatever was moving out there wouldn’t let him. It made his stomach churn around the butterflies that Cas’ presence had put there. “What’s out there?”

“I don’t know,” Cas admitted. “But I see it too.”

Dean turned to him. The light caught and filled his irises, turning their usual blue to a shade only a breath away from white. His bottom lips trembled and parted, slightly. He breathed a short blast of mist into the air. Dean watched it swirl and bank as Cas took another sharp breath.

“Probably doesn’t mean much comfort,” Cas said.

“Huh?”

“That I see it too,” Cas explained, smiling weakly. He turned to Dean, caught him staring, and his expression changed from one of quiet contemplation to something almost like shock. He dipped his gaze to the trodden down snow, his porcelain cheeks flushing with life for a moment. In the dying light, the colour of Cas’ blush was lost, reduced to purple-ish grey. Dean wanted to see him in the sunshine, to catch the summer on his cheeks and his shoulders. See the long lines of muscle he’d glimpsed at through his robe bare and drinking in the sun.

“I’m quite probably crazy,” Cas went on. “Everyone else certainly seems to think so.”

Dean looked back out at the snow. “Nah,” he sighed. “I won’t believe that.”

Cas didn’t say anything for a while. In his periphery, Dean see him watching. He didn’t turn, though. He hoped Cas was undressing him, too.

“I fought at Okinawa,” Cas said, very quietly. So quiet that Dean thought maybe he’d imagined it. He didn’t look at Cas to make sure. He stared out, unseeing. Waiting for more. “Thirteen thousand dead, just on our side. Tens of thousands of local civilians. Fathers, mothers,” Cas paused and looked down at his hands. “A baby girl.”

Dean frowned. Cas took a few small steps and leaned against the whale’s ribs, calves against the bowed bones. They creaked, the snow shifting around them under his weight, but he didn’t notice. “I was eighteen when I left,” he said, distantly. Dean gasped. Cas smiled and shook his head minutely.

“Twenty,” Dean returned.

“It’s funny; those two years feel like they make such a difference,” Cas sighed.

Dean watched him carefully. No wonder he’d looked so young in his draft picture. He was a kid. Like Sam. Dean’s pulse leapt. They’d be almost the same age. Maybe Cas was actually a little younger. Cas carried himself like an ancient being, and spoke as though world weary, the words coming slow and halfhearted as though he could barely stand the challenge it was to say them. If Cas had been eighteen when he drafted, he’d have been nineteen at Okinawa. It had only been four years. He was _still_ a kid. And he was ruined. Just like Sam.

“I was in Europe,” Dean offered.

Cas’ eyes flicked up from the ground. “France?”

Dean shook his head. “Poland.”

Cas frowned. “But-”

“We started out in Germany but then there was an air raid. Our side,” Dean explained, with a weak smile. “After that, it was just me.”

Cas’ wide blue eyes tightened with understanding. “I’m sorry.”

Dean shook his head. “It was a long time ago,” he sighed. “At least, feels that way. Sometimes.” He took a deep breath. “Other times I’m still there.”

Cas nodded. “I know what you mean.”

Dean took a deep breath. “I couldn’t find anyone,” he began, frowning. “We were off our rendezvous by miles. I don’t know how many. I didn’t know where I was. Then,” Dean laughed dryly. That had been when he’d found Sam. He couldn’t make himself tell that part of the story out loud. “A Nazi patrol unit found me.”

“What year?” Cas asked quietly.

Dean didn’t look at him when he answered. “Forty three.”

“Fuck,” Cas replied, aptly. Dean liked the shape of that word on his mouth. “You’re lucky to be alive,” Cas said.

“Sometimes I wonder if I am,” Dean admitted. He hadn't meant to say that out loud. He waited for Cas to be outraged. 

“Lucky?”

Dean shook his head. “No. Alive.”

Cas frowned. “No.” He stood up from the bones. There was very little space between them. Cas’ eyes searched Dean’s, and Dean tried quick to figure out if the moment was going where he thought it might be.

He’d not let anyone get that close to him since before he left. Some days were endless in Dean’s memory. Summer afternoons by the river down the back of their old house, Sammy just a gangly little kid, Dean with the flush of youth in his heart, reaching for the tyre swing and pulling it as far back as it would go so he could send Sam sailing up into the air then crashing down into the water. Days running round the streets of his hometown, coming home with scraped knees and cigarette smoke in his hair. His mom singing in the kitchen, the smell of cookies pouring through the house, Dean lay on his front, breathing it in, listening, dreaming. Days spent carrying Sam’s weight on his shoulders, dragging him across the frozen ground. Holding his head up whilst he poured water into his mouth. Holding him against his chest, rocking him gently, whispering a little song, thinking it was over, Sam was gone, dead in his own arms. He got up. He screamed, he ran. He knew they were close to an encampment. He had smelled the wood smoke for days.

They almost caught him right off the bat. Dean hadn’t realized how tired he was until he started running. When they started firing their guns at him, the adrenaline kicked in and he flew through the trees, leading them back to Sam. At least if they found him maybe they’d help. Prisoner of war camps were still camps, and that had to be better for Sam than half-buried snow-holes in the German winter snow.

“You’re alive,” Cas said. Dean could taste the words. They were sweet and soft and meant to warm him up, but instead they sucked the last bit of warmth right out of him. Cas took both of Dean’s freezing hands in his, somehow warm still despite the frosty air. His grip made the stitched-up slice across Dean’s palm smart. “I can feel it.”

Dean’s breath hitched. “I wish I couldn’t feel a damn thing,” he whispered.

“Don’t say that,” Cas whispered back, desperately.

“Why not?” He clutched one of Cas’ hands tighter and dropped the other so he could grab the back of Cas’ coat.

“Dean,” Cas said, sharply, like saying his name hurt. They held each other, for a time, breathing each other’s breaths and going giddy with it. Eventually, Cas curled away, his arms wrapped as tightly around himself as his layers would allow. The light was fading, faster than it seemed to have before. Cas walked back to the house. It took a moment, but Dean followed him.

Cas’ coat was already hung over the back of one of the kitchen chairs. Dean could hear water hitting the enamel of the bath upstairs. He shed his coat. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs, listening to the water running, imagining Cas sat on the chair in the bathroom listening for him to follow him up. Dean took a breath, and climbed.

The bathroom door was open, but not all the way. It was an invitation to join or watch but Dean couldn’t tell exactly which and his uncertainty bound him to assume the former. There was a bundle of sweaters just inside the door, a knitted mound. A pair of graying jeans. Thermal pants, white, once whiter. A beige vest. In a line towards the bath, where Cas was standing, the pale lines of his body exposed. His skin seemed to glow in the room's low light as though it had caught the light of the sun as it reflected from the snow and kept it for it's own, and he was really, truly, beautiful. 

Cas reached across the tub and turned the tap, long arm reaching, back muscles undulating gently under his skin. Patches of it glinted in the light of the gas lamps he had arranged beneath himself, shadows revealing themselves. Scars. Skin burned smooth, torn into strange peaks. He'd been shot at. A lot. Dean hissed involuntarily. Cas froze, peering back at Dean over his shoulder. Dean could only see a sliver of his blue eye. His expression was hidden. 

Dean's heart was beating so loud that he could hear it over the massive ringing in his ears. The room was fractured. He was there and he was also lying on muddy ground, looking across and seeing the guy who’d been sharing his biscuits screaming, holding the thing that had been his leg. There was dirt in the air. Dean could barely hear the shouting over the ringing and the thud, thud, thud of his pulse still championing his life inside him. His right ear bled for hours, when the bombing stopped. The hearing wasn’t all gone but it was mostly. When the sun came up, everyone else was dead.

Cas swirled his hand in the water, the sound of his fingers breaching the surface dragging Dean back into the room. He was still frozen in the doorway, jaw locked shut. Cas turned a little more towards him, frowning like he was trying to work something out. Dean couldn't breathe. Without the tap water running the silence in the room was a weight on Dean's chest and in the stillness it was going to suffocate him. He could feel the massive emptiness of the snow and the sea and the hollow rib cages of the whales left on the beach, all of it filled with the silence between them. 

Finally, Cas moved again, slow. Deliberate. He leaned forwards, arching his back like a cat. That little movement, Dean knew without a doubt Cas was about as straight as a bent post. His breath hitched. Cas noticed. He turned, again almost theatrical, but his expression was deadly serious. There were marks on his front. Bullet wounds like on his back, but other things, too. Tiny white bumps. Raised marks all over his chest. Dean followed a trail of them down right past his navel. There were more of them on the insides of his slender thighs. 

Dean had scars the same on his own arms. He could picture his dad's face as he'd pressed the cigarettes into his skin. "Are you watching, Dean?" he'd say. "Real men have to know pain."

"What happened to you?" Dean whispered, the words somehow managing to make it out of his mouth before he'd even allowed his mind to process what he'd seen. 

"Bad things," Cas answered, voice low. He kept his eyes on the ground. 

Dean stepped forward and caught his wrist. There were long lines from the heels of Cas' hands almost all the way to his elbows. Cas looked up at him, eyes wide and wary. For an awful moment Dean thought he might start begging not to be hurt again. He didn’t. He just stared up, silent. Waiting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has fought and fought me. I have NOT been able to get it right but I THINK it's alright now!! Sorry for the delay, folks!


	7. Coward

[Coward. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoP44KNu0IQ)

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next morning at breakfast, Cas sat and ate at the table. Anna was overjoyed. Gabriel kept giving him sideways glances, a quiet smile slowly breaking into a grin as the meal wore on. Dean didn’t ask how long it had been since Cas last sat down and ate with his family. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer. He was already getting too many reasons to stay in Barrow. He didn’t need another one. He had to go before Cas looked him in the eye again. Before he saw something in him that he couldn’t allow himself to see.

Dean had done a lot of disappointing in his life. He had to leave before he had to the chance to ruin Cas forever. He would, eventually. He knew it. Cas kept smiling at Dean over his waffles, beautiful little conspiratorial grins that stabbed Dean right through the gut. He had to leave, because looking at those eyes, knowing just a little of what Cas had been through, he knew that he would destroy him. That’s what Dean did, all his life. He destroyed things. And he knew it. And he had to leave before his feelings made him too selfish to do the right thing.

After they’d eaten, Dean swaddled himself in his outer layers and made his way out onto the snow. Outside, it was unusually quiet. The wind was the least violent it had been for Dean’s entire stay. He climbed the hill towards town, keeping at the edges of the hardened lines of tracks that had been left the day before when the people walked down to the water. He remembered then that there was no sun that day, for the first time. He shuddered, squinting in the low light of the softly glowing streetlamps. The twilight was only just beginning. Its reach had barely managed to make much of the sky any less than solid black.

He heard something, just before he reached the line of the houses. He whipped his head around.

He couldn’t see past the glow of the lamps. The light fell and illuminated small circles around them but they blinded him to everything else. Dean turned back to the track, kept his head down, and walked. He was almost at the houses by then. Just a few more feet and they’d have him protected on the flanks. He peered back over his shoulder at the hotel, its few lit windows. He couldn’t stay. He had to leave, now.

He heard it again. A low cry. Like a baby. He stopped. The lamplight caught in the mist of his breath, bleached it into a tiny snow flurry. He peered at the darkness. He couldn’t see anything. Just more dark. “Hello?” he called. His voice was nothing, stolen by the barely-blowing wind. He took a step towards the sound and heard it again, clearer. It wasn’t a cry; it was a yowl. “Sal?”

She darted out from down the side of one of the houses, limping slightly. She barked at Dean. He ruffled her fur, snow coming off her in chunks. She must have been out there all night. He stood up, looking back at the hotel again. She was supposed to be with the others, safe in the pen.

“Shit.”

Dean tried to break into a run but the ground was too slippery and he almost went flying. He only just managed to recover the slip and hurry down. His breathing was ragged. Sal was a few steps in front of him, trotting through the snow. Every now and then she barked out into the dark, the sound marked in her own misty breath cloud. Dean’s heart seemed to have relocated itself to his throat, where it swelled and burst what felt like three times a second.

Around the back of the hotel, the pen was empty. The door hung wide. Sal stopped a few feet away, barking and whining. Dean stepped forward cautiously. The twilight was growing, and there was almost – almost – enough light for him to see. The wood slats that held the dogs inside were broke, split at dog height. There was fur clinging just barely to the splintered edges.

The sun came close enough to the horizon that the sky turned almost like it was day. The floor in the pen was stained with blood. Sal still stood behind Dean, barking. He might have been stood there for half an hour. He turned, looked at Sal, barking, growling. Behind her, the snow sloped down onto the beach. The white canvas of it was broken by dog tracks and red stains. Near the curved cathedral’s of the whale’s frosty bones, one of the dogs lay on its side. The wind stirred it’s fur. Where its body should have undulated over ribs, the dog was flat. Its insides lay like red snakes on the ground.

He staggered towards it. He couldn’t tell what bits of the scattered meat was what. They’d all begun to freeze. The dog had been very dead for some time. “Frozen fuel injector,” he muttered under his breath.

Sal was still standing where she’d stopped near to the pen, barking at Dean. He crossed back to her and fussed her head. “Come on. We’ve got to tell someone what’s happened,” he told her. She continued to bark inanely, whining sadly in between, a lonesome, hollow sound that Dean swore he recognised from his nights in the Nazi prison camp, carried over to him on the icy breeze.

“Dean?”

Gabriel was standing by the back of the house, the front of his coat hanging open. Dean shook his head. “Must have been a bear or something.”

Gabe shuffled down on the snow towards the dog. “Oh, Jesus.” He covered his mouth with his hand. “Wasn’t a bear.”

“Don’t you guys get bears out here?”

“Oh, you bet we do.” Gabe put his hands on his hips. “Last I remembered though, bears have claws not knives.”

Dean looked back at the dog’s opened stomach, the near-straight gash through fur, skin, and fat. It was a cut, not a tear. “Nobody would kill a dog like this, would they?” Dean asked. Sal was still whining.

Gabe shrugged. “There’s trappers come through sometimes. This looks like something they could have done, I guess. Sadistic bastards.”

“Trappers?”

Gabe nodded. “Go out further north than here. There’s a few trappers’ cabins five, ten miles from town along the beach, but the huts are mostly further inland. They lure animals in and trap them, just like the name suggests. Sell them for fur and meat.”

Dean was beginning to wonder of there was any trade in Barrow that wasn’t based in the slaughter of wild animals and redistribution of their parts. He put his hand on the dead dog’s neck. Its fur was still soft, but the skin underneath was cold and nearly frozen.

On a second examination, it was obvious the fence of the dog pen had been broken from the inside. The lock, on the other hand had been forced from outside, with enough weight thrown at it that it had come clean off the door and the joist beside it, splintering free of the wood around the nails that once fixed it into place. Inside the pen, almost every one of wooden slats that formed the structure had been scratched and gnawed and ultimately snapped under the pressure of small bodies trying to get away from whatever opened the door. The struggle had been desperate, that much was clear.

Before he’d found Sam, Dean had been wandering around the German country side, darting from foxhole to foxhole, cover to cover, always trying to follow readymade footprints in the snow because they were likely to lead him to shelter and would also keep him free of a tail. For almost a week of meandering, Dean only heard guns in the distance, and the bodies he passed were all old and stuck fast to the frosty ground. Then he reached the camp. They’d been inside what looked like a farm house. There were a few dead chickens on the ground and a cow huffing smoky air not far from it. The bodies were strewn across a room that had been used in another life to serve family meals on the rustic wood table that was now stained with blood, out of the fancy oven against which a boy lay, his shirt hooked onto one of the knobs. You could see the last movements in every one of them. The one by the door was running, trying to reload his gun. The one over the bench was ducking out of the line of fire. Hands empty and reaching, eyes open and clouded over with settling dust. Extinguished.

“I’ll get you a beer,” Gabe said as Dean slumped down next to the table.

“You have beer?”

“Yep. Beer and bears. That’s what we’re all about in the arctic circle.” He cracked off the cap and slid the bottle down the table towards Dean.

“Thanks.”

“You look like shit,” Gabe sighed.

Dean grinned. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Something happen back there?”

Dean’s smile slipped so he sipped his drink to hide it. “Naw. I’m fine.”

Gabe didn’t look convinced. “We should probably tell Bobby about his dogs.”

That sent a chill through Dean. Of course; the dogs were his ticket out, and they were gone. He gulped his drink, the icy liquid sliding into him like an icicle through his heart. “And Benny.”

“Benny?”

“It wasn’t a bear,” Dean reminded him.

Gabe shook his head. “Benny’s got no authority over the trappers. At least not in practice.”

“Trappers?” Cas said, the stairs creaking under him. His expression was indecipherable; frowning; the corner of his lip caught in his teeth; nostrils flared defensively; eyes darting from Dean to Gabe and back again over and over until Dean started to feel motion sick watching them flicker.

“Don’t worry about it, Cassie,” Gabe murmured in a tone deliberately constructed to sound reassuring. Cas’ eye twitched with frustration. “Something happened to the dog pen.”

“Something?”

“Door’s been forced, the dogs escaped. One of them’s dead on the beach,” Gabe summarised tiredly.

Cas’ eyes narrowed. “Dead how?”

“It was probably a b-”

“A bear? Don’t give me that shit, Gabriel,” Cas hissed, voice low and dangerous. Dean sat board-straight. There was an edge in what Cas was saying, that stuff he wasn’t saying never quite breaking the surface tension. Dean bit back his questions, because Gabe had just been asking him the same thing. What had happened back there, all those times where Dean’s life got edited wrong and he appeared in the wrong spot in his memory, waking up half a decade ago? Maybe that made him as crazy as Sam was.

Cas drew a sharp breath. “ _Something_ broke into the pen, just like _something_ happened to dad, and those trappers, and every dog team we’ve ever tried to keep.”

“Cas, can you hear yourself?” Gabe asked, standing up and squaring himself to his brother.

Cas turned to Dean. For a moment, his blue eyes were blazing and Dean wasn’t sure if he’d be able to say anything to him at all. Cas blinked, breaking the spell, and his expression softened. “The lock was torn off the pen.” It wasn’t a question.

Dean gulped. “Less torn. More shoved. I’d say it was blasted but you’d have to be hell of a shot not to damage the wood.”

Cas’ eye twitched. He turned to Gabriel. “Bears. When are you going to start paying attention to what’s really happening? How can you go on pretending you don’t see-”

“You sound like a nut, Cas! I won’t listen to this!” Gabe snapped.

Cas’ shoulders sagged and he covered his face with his hands. “Don’t.”

Gabe took a step back, almost falling over a chair in his haste. “Shit.”

“Fine,” Cas squeaked.

“I’m sorry.” He reached to put a hand on Cas’ shoulder but he jerked away.

“Please don’t.”

Gabe sighed and turned back towards Dean, barely letting his gaze settle.

“Dean?” Cas said, distantly. “Was it a bear?”

Dean looked at Gabe but he pressed his eyes shut.

“Uh. The, um, the dog. It was gutted, I think. One slash down the front of it. It looked too neat to be a wild animal.” Dean looked at Gabe again but he still didn’t offer any guidance.

Cas nodded. “You’re sure?”

“We agreed,” Dean mumbled.

Cas’ gaze was nowhere near the searing shade he’d mustered before, but it was jagged and steely when it fell on his brother. “A bear,” he said, so quietly Dean wondered if he was meant to have heard it at all.

The wind rattled the outside of the hotel. Somewhere beyond the window, the gate cracked against it’s frozen post. “Goddamn it that god damn fucking gate!” Gabe snapped. His fists were balled at it’s sides. Both Dean and Cas were staring at him. Dean’s heart raced. Gabe looked from one of them to the other and chewed his lip. Taking a deep breath, he stopped bracing himself. “We need to tell Bobby what’s happened,” Gabe said. “Cas, you stay here. Anna is playing upstairs.”

“Alright,” Cas muttered. He looked anything but. Dean wanted to touch him, kiss him, hold him close to his chest, but he didn’t. He just gave him a weak smile.

“It was probably trappers,” Gabe offered with a shrug.

“That’s what they said,” Cas agreed.

“They?” Dean asked. Both of them looked at him, exhausted and unamused.

“Let’s go.”

“If this has happened before, why did you agree to keep Bobby’s dogs in the first place?”

“It was probably trappers, like I said!” Gabe snapped, aggressively shoving his chair under the table.

“Probably?” Dean asked weakly. He was looking at Cas, desperate for some kind of reassurance, but he was offering none. “Is there something going on here I should know about?”

Gabe turned, eyes livid. “Why? You’re leaving! You’re going back home to the sunshine! You’re going to waltz over that ridge and never think about us again?”

Cas’ blue eyes fixed onto Dean’s in shock and disbelief.

“Oh, come on, Cassie! What did you think he was doing here?” Gabe hissed. “He’s got some pretty little wife-y back home and now he’s got this crisis out of his system he’s going to crawl back into bed with her and appreciate her more than ever, isn’t that right?”

Dean felt like he’d been stabbed in the gut. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“And you don’t know anything about us,” Gabe returned with a dry laugh. “Now come on. We need to tell Bobby we’ve killed his dogs.”


	8. Forgetting You

**_[Forgetting You.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIzYbV8ZhvI) _ **

 

 

 

 

 

 

The bar was the busiest Dean had ever seen it. Half the town was packed into the worn booths, more gathered along the bar itself. The chatter hushed when Dean and Gabe entered, boots still caked with snow. Dean shook his hood off and Gabe removed his snow-capped hat. The storm still hadn’t properly hit, but the snow was falling, a downy precursor of what was to come.

“Gabe,” Jo said from behind the bar. The two men in front of her parted, turning their attention to him. None of them acknowledged Dean at all. “Bobby’s in the back.”

Jo opened up the bar and let Gabe through. For a moment Dean thought she was going to stop him from following, but then her gaze flickered to his, and back to the floor, and she let him pass.

The room behind the bar was like a living room, only with two huge beer crates and boxes upon boxes of wine, whiskey, gin. “Folks need the liquor to keep warm,” Bobby said in his Texan accent, clapping Dean on the back. “What’s your poison?” he asked.

“Whiskey,” Gabe answered gruffly.

“I know you,” Bobby tutted. “I meant the boy.”

“Same.”

“Figures,” Bobby grumbled, grabbing a bottle and handing it to Dean. “Come on round,” he said. “I know why you’re here.”

They followed Bobby behind the beer crates to a space that looked like it was usually used to play poker. There was a large-ish, circular table and surrounded by seven mis-matched chairs. There was a naked lightbulb hung from the underside of the stairs that the space was nestled under. It fizzed quietly, the sound like a fly trapped in a jar. The light swayed and dimmed periodically, moving and fading in time with the wind howling outside. In the darkest corner, there was a man. His hand reached out into the light, fingers wrapping around a glass of clear liquid which he then claimed back into his darkness. On the table in front of him there was a dog. Or rather, most of a dog.

It was missing its head.

“What is he doing here?” Gabe asked Bobby, flatly.

The man in the darkness sneered, white teeth catching the light. He leaned forwards. His face was pallid, except where it was split in long, red-yellow scabs on his cheeks. “Gabriel,” he said, rolling the name around his mouth and then knocking back his entire drink at once. “How’s your brother?”

Gabe leaned across the table. “You better think carefully about what the next words to come out of your mouth will be.”

“Gabriel,” Bobby said softly, putting a hand on Gabe’s shoulder. “I assume you’re here to tell me something about my dogs,” he huffed. “Well, spit it out. But from the looks of what Luc here’s shown me, I’m not expecting any good news.”

Gabe continued to glare at Luc, who stared back with a cool, steady snigger. The wounds on his cheeks were raw and glaring. Dean had similar ones on the backs of his knuckles. First the skin had turned cherry red, then begun to crack. It was from the cold, Bobby said. The slash across his palm was healing but the chill bites weren’t. The ones on Luc’s face looked older, somehow, but no better sealed. It made things squirm in the pit of Dean’s stomach.

“Something broke into the pen and scared them so much they brought down the side of it trying to get out. There was one dead on the beach, and Dean found Sal. She’s back at our place,” Gabe explained, smoothly.

“Something?” Bobby pressed, folding his arms over his chest.

“Yeah. Or someone,” Gabe muttered accusingly.

“Gabe said looked like trappers,” Dean offered, in the hopes of being helpful. Bobby glared at him, and Luc’s smile grew wider.

“Did he now?” Luc asked.

“I did.”

“Boys,” Bobby said in a low warning tone. Neither of them took notice.

“Trappers have been coming through here since long before there was ever a town,” Luc told Gabriel, sitting straighter in his chair and diverting his gaze from Gabe’s face to the now-empty glass he was rolling between his palms. “Winters here are no place for _tourists_.”

“Tourists?” Gabe growled, at exactly the same moment Dean said “those dogs were my ticket out of here!”

Luc’s gaze flickered to Dean’s face, cool and contemplative. “How… interesting.” He looked back at Bobby. “You know how it is out here, old man. You know the winters as good as anybody born here. There’s something out there more than wind and snow.” He pointed at Dean. “Maybe it needed him to stay.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Dean asked.

“Superstitious nonsense,” Bobby growled.

“Wives tales and bed time stories meant to frighten little kids,” Gabe added.

“What do you mean?” Dean barked.

Luc cocked his head to the side, his hands still for the first time. “Ah. You’ve seen it.” There was something about Luc’s expression, the way his cool eyes bored right back into Dean’s. He felt like he was looking out across the snow again, unable to see what it was that was moving no matter how hard he looked. His eyes always seemed to miss that vital, moving thing. Luc’s smile came back, even wider and sourer than before.  

“Nobody here has time for your bullshit, Luc,” Gabe said, firmly. “So unless you know what happened to those dogs, you better get out of here.”

“Whoa now.” Luc raised his hands as if in surrender. “How exactly do you suggest I do that? Seems to me like you here in Barrow have a little transportation problem, with half the town’s teams out of service.”

“What do you mean?”

Bobby sighed. “Whatever scared my team out of your pen went to a lot of other folks’ places, too.”

“One little old trapper like me couldn’t do all of that in a night’s work,” Luc said with a quirk of his eyebrows.

“Now listen to me, you slippery fucker,” Gabe growled. If looks could kill, Luc would be not only dead but smoked into oblivion.

“Gabe, let it be,” Bobby mumbled in intervention. Gabe's hands were balled into fists at his sides. His eye twitched. Bobby put a hand on his shoulder and he looked at it as though he was trying to set it on fire. 

“I think I’ll be off now, Mr Singer.” Luc got to his feet. The movement disturbed a bad smell that was clinging to him; dead things; oil; unwashed clothes. Dean wrinkled his nose. “It was nice meeting you,” Luc said to Dean, extending a scarred and scabbed hand towards him. Dean hesitated before it took it. Luc seemed to deliberately press his cool fingers over Dean’s cracked knuckles. Dean winced.

Luc swooped Gabriel with a cursory glance, then went back out into the bar, the door swinging open and bringing the chatter in with it for a moment.

“Slippery fucking bastard,” Gabe cursed.

“He ain’t pleasant, I’ll give you that,” Bobby agreed.

“Who was he?”

Bobby shook his head. “Luc’s a trapper who’s been over-wintering out here for years. Doesn’t swing through town much. Not exactly a people person.”

“Yeah, I was getting strong ‘not-a-people-person’ signals,” Dean grumbled. “You got any more of that whiskey?”

“I’ll put it on your tab, you cheeky bastard,” Bobby said, reaching for the bottle on the table and sloshing amber liquid into first Dean’s, then Gabe’s glass. He took a swig right from the bottle. “Call me paranoid, but putting the dogs out in that pen of yours, Gabe, gave me the heebie jeebies.”

Gabe snorted. “You subscribing to that bullshit now, old man?”

“I’m just saying, it’s not the first time you’ve lost a pack up at the hotel, is it?”

Gabe shifted uncomfortably. “It was my fault. I didn’t bolt the door.”

Bobby pursed his lips. “Yeah, well.” He shook his head. “More whiskey?” he asked Dean, who had again drained his glass.

Dean nodded and held it out towards him. The whiskey was making the inside of his mouth tingle. It wasn’t as fierce as the stuff Cas kept under the sink, but Dean hadn’t ever drunk much that was. He wondered if he’d brewed it himself. From what Bobby had already told him, he’d spent six months out there in the hotel alone, and he didn’t get very strong people-person vibes from him, either. Had he been shut up in there, all alone, drinking whiskey and listening to the gate bang against the post all through the night, hearing voices in the wind?

There was something wrong with Cas, Dean knew. Like Sam. Always Sam. How was it that no matter how far he went everything was still about Sam? Cas heard crying in the wind at night, but Dean heard his brother fighting to keep himself in the here and now, and slowly losing that battle. Maybe that’s all it was. The something that Dean could never quite see and the voices Cas could never quite make out were just their way of filling the nothingness of the snow, the white expanse of it going on and on for miles into emptiness and nothing but more whiteness as far as Dean’s eyes could see. Maybe it was doing things to them.

“What did Luc mean about there being something else out there?”

Gabe glared at him. “They’re just stories.”

“Cas was-”

“Don’t bring my brother into this,” Gabe drawled. He knocked back another glass of whiskey and reached for the bottle. Dean raised his hand in half-hearted apology. Gabe’s expression soured like Luc had walked back into the room, but the bitterness was all directed at Dean. Dean shifted in his seat.

Bobby sighed loudly. “Cas grew up here from a tiny baby. The stories of these parts are his stories too.”

Gabe bobbed his head, a single nod. “Fill his head up with bullshit about magic snow and curses.”

“Curses?”

“They’re ld trapper stories, mostly. Like they do with the animals out here, they pick up stories from each other, bind them into something new, and hope it sells,” Bobby explained. “A lot of it comes from the Inuit folks who live not far off, but not all of it. There’s been overwintering around here for centuries.”

“The trappers stay the whole winter?”

“Oh yeah. Not much you can do after a certain point. Soon, the beach will freeze. Now the long night’s drawing, the real snows will start up, too. The trappers come up here, hunt when they can, and sleep their way through the rest of it. There’s big trade in seal skins, or there used to be.” Bobby gestured towards the back of the building, presumably to the snow that stretched seemingly endlessly on the other side of its wall. “There’s the ruins of a load of old huts the whalers used to use way over that way. They’d go out on their boats in the summer, you know. Most of them would go back south in the winter but a few of them would stay behind, too.”

“Why?” Dean asked, frowning. If the option to go back somewhere where the sun rose every morning like it was supposed to was there, he couldn’t understand how someone could refuse it.

Gabe rolled his eyes. “Why indeed.”

“Pride. Arrogance. They wanted to prove they had the biggest balls. Men in droves deciding they could stick it out this way. There were plenty of them who died because didn’t insulate their huts proper, or didn’t keep enough in their stores, and plenty more who went mad trying. It does things to people, this place. You’re either cut out for it or you ain’t.”

“And so the stories, they’re about crazy people?”

Bobby huffed. “Not exactly.”

“No, the idea,” Gabe cut in, bitingly. “Is that there’s a force out there that drove those men mad on purpose.”

“What?” Dean pressed, frowning.

“All the accounts are vague, of course,” Gabe continued in the same harsh tone. “People describe being shown haunting visions of their past until they could no longer tell what was real and what imagined.”

Dean gulped and took a large swig of his whiskey. That was something he understood, mixing up nows and thens. He remembered Sam, his head between his knees, telling him there was someone else in his head, scrambling his thoughts until they all ran together and never shut up. “And then what happens?”

“Oh, fuck knows,” Gabe dismissed, shaking his head. “There’s a lot of that kind of bullshit going around. It gets under people’s skin.”

“People use the old stories to get away with a load of crap,” Bobby explained, leaning towards Dean. “Trappers’ are always the first ones to call in superstition if something like this happens.” He gestured at the headless dog. “Makes them look mighty suspicious to those people who think the stories are a load of bull, but there’s so many folks who still hold stock in them that if it gets brought in to anything, there’s no way it can ever really get shaken out again.”

“I’m going back to the hotel,” Gabe announced, getting to his feet. “You coming?” he asked Dean, gruffly. He nodded. Gabe went out into the bar. Dean lingered for a moment.

“Hey, Bobby?” Dean asked, keeping his voice low. Bobby didn’t respond other than to slightly narrow his eyes. “What would you say to me if I told you I thought I saw something out there, on the snow, something that wouldn't let me see it completely?”

Bobby frowned and drew a long breath. “I’d tell you to take the first ticket out of here whilst you still can.”

“But… what if Luc’s right? Hasn’t this sort of thing happened before?”

Bobby looked even more cautious. He shifted his weight uncomfortably and looked away. He grabbed the whiskey bottle but didn’t pour anything out of that. “What’s give you that impression?”

“Something Cas said.”

Bobby whipped his head around. “Them boys have been through a lot.”

“Yeah, I’m beginning to get a real feel for that,” Dean said sourly.

“Especially Cas.”

“I was a soldier, too,” Dean reminded him, but even as the words formed on his tongue, he knew that he was missing the point. Cas had more than just the scars of war. Dean had seen them, little white marks like pearly stars in the creamy whiteness of his skin. He folded around himself, disappeared into his own head. Whatever had happened to him had happened long before he went to Okinawa, and going there had only made it worse. Cas wasn't hardened; he was hollowed. 

Bobby shook his head. “You don’t understand. And it’s probably best if it stays that way. I’ll go talk to a few people, see what I can do about getting you back over that ridge so you can be off again, back to wherever it is you came from.”

Dean grimaced at the thought of his empty house. Would they have boarded the door shut? By now, it would probably have been repossessed. He left all his money to pay for Sammy’s treatment, and it’s not like they were anything close to owning the house outright. He thought about walking down the same streets he’d towed Sammy down in a little red cart as a kid, seeing the street corners where he’d bought him ice cream. Having to face the tree in the park where they’d carved their initials with a rusty pen knife that Dean had found under the bushes.

He followed Gabe out into the bar and back down the windy snow trail to the hotel. Anna was sat at the kitchen table, having worked her magic on the radio again. Gabe, who had walked in steely silence, beamed when he saw her and lifted her high into the air, whirling her around so she squealed with delight. "Where's uncle Cas?" he asked her. 

"He went to bed," she told him, unconcerned.

Gabe put her back on the floor and she continued her dancing. He glared at Dean. "He was doing so well."

Dean almost gasped audibly. “You’re blaming me?”

Gabe laughed dryly. “You waltz up here, and you think that you can fuck up our lives? You think it’s easy, living like this?”

“No, but I-”

“I hope to god Bobby finds someone to haul your pathetic ass out of here before you’re stuck overwintering. The last thing he needs is you coming here, filling his head with shit.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You should have let me tell him it was bears!” Gabe yelled.

“What?!”

“It might have been bears. Why’d you have to tell him that shit about the lock? What’s the point?”

“You’d rather lie to him?”

“If it helps!” Gabe’s voice was shrill and thin. His blistering rage had cooled to a simmering frustration. His muscles were taut not as though to attack but defend. He was bracing himself again. Dean wondered if this is how he had been about Sam. Those long days. Nights. Months. He should have lied, Dean told himself. But he had tried lying, singing, yelling the truth just an inch from Sam’s face but nothing could reach him. Sam was deep at the bottom of a lake. Dean only had a string of bubbles to be assured he was alive. He wasn’t even sure that the thing lurking beneath the surface was even Sam, anymore. Not Sam like Dean knew him. Sam like he should have been. There, festering, moulding the inside of Dean’s head, the ugly thought, the one he should not think, the thought that in a desperately vital, crucial way, Sam was really dead after all. Dean had saved nothing but a broken shell. The contents he had loved were gone, drained, shrivelled up. Frozen in German snow, thick under Dean’s boots. The real Sam was there. Buried.

Dean resurfaced, clutching the edge of the table. Gabe was still talking. He looked conflicted; equal parts furious and despairing. He groaned. "Look. Cas is. He's. Well." Gabe shook his head, floundering. "That sort of thing would mean more to him than you'd think."

That sparked a warmth Dean’s mind swarmed towards like a flock of moths. The flickers melted just enough of the frost from his thoughts that he found it in himself to smile. It was funny, he realised. Gabe was flustered, teetering around a confession that Dean had already heard. "Gabe,” he said sternly.

"Look, I. I've seen him... I've seen him hurt enough."

"So, he's queer?" Dean interrupted, one eyebrow raised. Gabe looked away, cheeks red, obviously at a loss as to what to say. "Okay."

Gabe narrowed his eyes. "Okay?" he repeated, dumb founded.

Dean nodded. "That's right."

Gabe shook his head. "Don't you... don't you..."

"Get it?" Dean finished for him, laughing bitterly. Gabe's expression said the exact thing Sam's had the night he'd walked in on Dean and the postman, former with his cheek pressed against the bonnet of the car in the garage, latter with his hand knotted into the former's hair. No hatred, just shock so extreme that it skirted incomprehension. "But Dean," Sam had said, eventually. "It's a sin." Dean had laughed so hard at that it felt like his lungs were going to burst. "Lots of things are supposed to be sins, Sammy," Dean had told him, patting him on the back. "Maybe sometimes god decides he's going to turn a blind eye."

Dean looked Gabe right in the eye. "Yeah. I do, actually."

"Right."

"Right," Dean agreed with a short nod. "And you're wrong, by the way, about what I'm doing here."

"I am?"

"Yeah. I've never had a _wife."_

 


	9. To be Alone With You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello yes I'm still alive, aahhaaa sorry about that interlude. Normal programming will now resume.

 

 

[ **_To be Alone with You._ ** ](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dTc--0sZbrE)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dean split another short stump of wood in two with the blunt axe he’d found next to the stack of it. Sal whined from her vigil several feet away from him. The wood shed wasn’t far from the dog pen, and Sal wouldn’t get any closer.

“Alright, asshole,” he mumbled. “Nobody asked you to come out here with me.”

Dean had never really liked dogs. He’d been chased by a couple as a kid, and though he could no longer remember the specific events, they’d left him with a distaste for them that usually manifested in avoidance. Since Dean had found her out in the snow, following whatever happened to Bobby’s sled team, Sal had hardly left Dean alone. Sam had always wanted a dog. Their neighbours back in Kansas had always had spaniels – when they were teenagers Dean had always teased Sam that the dogs had inspired his long haired look. Their dad had told Sam once that if he could keep a goldfish alive for two months, he’d get him a dog for Christmas. When Dean left for the war, the first was damn near three years old and Sammy still didn’t have his puppy.

Sal had wide blue eyes, more like Cas’ than Sam’s, but something about her face reminded Dean of his little brother. It was the brightest part of the day, almost like the night was lifting, and he could make out the snow still clinging to her fur from where she’d rolled in it, and that she had her ears pinned back against her head. She whined again, noticing she’d caught Dean’s attention, and yipped.

“What?” he asked. Sal wagged her tail, kicking up a small flurry of snow. He had to admit that she was pretty cute. Begrudgingly, he was warming to her. Every night, he’d fall asleep under her watchful gaze, and every morning, she’d be curled at the foot of his bed, head resting faithfully on his leg. Dean rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah. Whatever.”

Dean grabbed another log from the pile, and Sal barked louder. Dean squinted off into the blue-ish darkness, the mid-day swell of brightness already beginning to fade. There was a strong wind blowing, turning up the top layer of powdery snow into the air, turning it over on itself like a flock of tiny white birds. These waves sprang up all across the land. The actual sea looked completely still. Dean put the log down on the chopping block and swung the axe down into the side of it, turning out to the sea again. It was completely solid black. Sal was still barking.

Dean walked down the slight slope to the water. The pebbles were completely covered in snow, not like they had been on the last day. The whale bones reached out towards him like giant claws, straining to reel him in. Sal didn’t come down the slope. There was a slight raise in the snow, barely noticeable now, all that marked the dead dog’s grave. Dean carefully walked around it, but it would probably be impossible to tell where it was exactly in a few more days. At least until spring came and everything thawed out.

The sea was, indeed, completely still. The wind stirred, catching up a drift of snow and scattering it across the water. It was frozen. Dean bent to press his fingers to it. He’d never seen anything like it. He squinted out across the dead water, wondering how far out it was frozen to.

Dean went back to the house. He let himself in through Gabe’s kitchen, leaving his newly-acquired snow boots by the door and stepping into his other ones. The kitchen was empty. Usually Gabe and Anna were in there, playing cards or listening to records or reading books. “Hello?” Dean called. He got no reply. He took off his coat, draping it over the back of one of the chairs. “Hello?” he shouted, louder. There was definitely nobody else in the house. Nobody apart from Cas.

He considered about going upstairs, but thought better of it. Gabe seemed to be going out of his way to avoid animosity, probably because he more than pulled his weight in terms of house work and Anna seemed to like him, but he wouldn’t tolerate Dean going within so much as a meter of Cas’ bedroom door.

“If you’d just let me talk to him,” Dean had said to Gabe the night before, after a few whiskeys.

“If he wanted to talk to you, he’d talk to you,” Gabe had grumbled. Dean could hardly argue with that, after all.

Dean's room felt very cold for the first time in several days. It was as though the warmth of small acceptances had seeped in and made him ignorant of the beating winds and piling snow outside the window. The black felt that lined the walls seemed to be closing in on him, the permafrost underneath crawling through invisible gaps and spearing right through Dean's heart. 

He wished he could let it go, that he could maintain the steadfast surety that had propelled him for so long that he needed to go, to run as far as he could from any sort of expectations. If people had looked at him in Lawrence the way they looked at him here, he'd have relished it. Now everyone seemed to want him to leave, he couldn’t bring himself to it. 

He sat on the edge of his lonely bed; it had to be a weird kind of reverse psychology. He'd ruined everything everywhere else, and now everyone was telling him his place would ruin him it was as though he had to say 'guys, guys... I'm already dead. Don't worry about it'. Still, he couldn't shake the niggling feeling of Cas' want for him to stay. That alone should have made him want to bolt. It  _had_ that morning, hadn't it? He'd walked out of the hotel with a sore conviction that he had to get out as fast as he could... 

Dean got to his feet and paced across the short space of his floor. What had it meant, the other night? Falling asleep in each other's arms... It had been so long since Dean had ever touched another person aside from shaking their hand, and all of a sudden he was cuddling? He raked his fingernails over his scalp. He was bad at stuff like that. Unless Cas wanted a shivering wreck, then he would be useless. He was a coward. He'd proved that to himself every time he left and moved on, starting with the drive away from the hospital. He couldn't even bare to turn back and see them lead him away, that's how pathetic he was. He couldn't even look back and admit to himself what he was doing, and that might even be worse than abandoning him in the first place. 

Dean still remembered the look on his brother's face when he'd opened the car door. It was like he'd been in a trance for days before it, not seeing anything of the world around him, anything of Dean or their neighbours or his room. Nothing. When he'd looked up, his expression had been one of mild surprise. That was all. He'd barely even cared. 

When they were kids, Sam and Dean used to run out to this ridge just outside of town. It was only ten feet tall, but to two kids it was a gigantic cliff. Things lived there -lizards and mice and small strange birds - and they spent the hottest days of the summers of their youth catching and trapping them. He remembered one year, something was eating their trash rig out of the cans. Every morning they'd get up and find bits of paper and all sorts of crap strewn over the drive way. Their dad, of course, was furious. He set up loads of traps to catch it; huge metal cages that Sam might have been able to fit in if he squished himself small enough. 

The night after all the traps had been set in place, they'd both lain away, listening for the clink of metal. Nothing happened for nearly a week, but then they heard it. They rushed out to behind the shed where the cage was kept and found it filled by a large raccoon. Sam asked what their dad would do with it when they found it. Dean said he didn't know but he did, just by instinct. The raccoons fate was sealed. Dean made Sam go back to bed. He lay awake under his duvet, squirming. The next morning their dad took the raccoon's head off with a shovel. 

"It didn't do anything wrong!" Sam yelled at him. 

"It's a pest, Sammy. The world's full of 'em. And you know how we deal with pests?" he'd shouted back. He lifted the shovel, blood smeared along the edge, and shook it within in an inch of Sam's nose. He'd cried, of course. But the trash was still being eaten. There had to be more. This time, when Dean heard the clink of the cage snapping shut, he darted out of bed and rushed outside without waking Sam. He took the cage, which was heavy, and carried it out to the ridge. The raccoon was unhappy. It made weird bawling sounds for the entire trip. Dean's arms ached from the weight of it. When he got there, he set it free. He opened the cage but the damned thing would not leave. He tipped it up and shook it but the raccoon held on, crying and scrabbling at the cage sides with its claws. 

"What the hell is wrong with you!?" he had screamed at it. "You're free!"

He walked back down the hall to the kitchen. He half expected the door to be locked, but it wasn’t. Even though he knew there wasn’t going to be anyone there, Dean braced himself before he walked into the room, preparing a response. He just wanted a bath, he’d tell them. He hadn't come for the company. He would have left by now if he could have and he only wanted to stay because everyone seemed to think it was a bad idea. 

The room was empty. Dean sighed, a mixture of relief and disappointment. He glanced at the photo of Cas on the mantel, with his wide eyes and easy smile. He climbed the stairs. 

The door to the bathroom was open so Dean walked right in, but then immediately froze to the spot. As it had been the day he'd first followed Cas upstairs, the bath was lit by gas lamps below in small, flickering clusters. Cas had not noticed Dean come in, though he was facing the door. Steam rose from the water around him, distorting the colour of his face and the book in his hands so it was like Dean was looking on through a sheet of stained glass. 

Dean didn't want to alert his presence. Cas' brow was knitted in careful concentration. He held his book with one hand, and with another, he balanced a tall glass of whiskey on the lip of the bath. Presently, he raised that too his lips, a rivulet of water freeing itself from behind his upper arm and dripping into the bath, the sound trembling through the hot, wet air and making the hairs in the back of Dean's neck stand up. Cas sipped his drink and sighed, his eyes fluttering closed. He turned the page, eyes following the top corner and freezing as they fell, finally, on Dean. 

Cas body went rigid at once. His eyes, misty through the the steam, went so wide that their blue seemed to pour right from them. "Sorry." He blinked, swallowing audibly. Dean didn't want to move or say anything. It was like he was pretending Cas still hadn't seen him, only his heart was beating in this throat. After a few seconds that seemed to stretch out into days, Cas drew a long breath. "How... How long have you been there?"

"Just a minute," Dean answered quickly as though that would make it better.  

Cas smiled, ducking his head. "Right." 

Dean felt himself blush. "Cas, what Gabe said, the other day..." Why was he speaking, and what was he hoping this was going to achieve? Cas only stared on, that unwavering gaze fixed on him and hanging. "It didn't mean anything." 

"I don't understand."

Dean drew a sharp breath, looking away. "I don't have some... some wife I'm trying to get away from. I... I know I'm a drifter, and I know running and that everyone knows it. But it's not like  _that_."

Cas moved, water splashing around him. He was frowning. "Dean..."

"Don't say anything," Dean cut in quickly. 

Cas dropped his book to the floor outside of the bath and reached to place his amber-filled glass on top of it. As he moved, Dean watched like he was going to be tested on it later. Cas stood up, water dripping off the lines of his body. Dean's heart was still in his throat, eyes sliding down, this time easily drinking in the harsh scars and knotted skin to the dark line if hair beneath Cas navel, and beneath it. He didn't mean for his gaze to linger there quite so long, but when he finally looked at Cas' eyes again, his expression had softened from anxious anticipation to a small smile. 

"I know," Dean choked out. 

Cas cocked his head to the side, stepping out onto the tiles. The soft light on his skin was resplendent, catching in the tiny droplets of water that clung to him like diamonds in chalk. "You know, what?"

Dean gulped. "I know that..." 

Cas was walking towards him, head still held at an angle, his eyes smouldering in the light. "Yes?"

"You're uh..." Dean ran his tongue along his bottom lip. Cas chuckled. He was upon him now, naked and glorious, the shadows of the flickering lamps arced across the ceiling like huge, translucent black feathered wings. " _Beautiful_." 

Cas hummed softly, and pressed their lips together, his hands hot from his bath and burning right through Dean's heavy clothes. He tore off his sweater and his shirt, twisting to expect a hand print to be scarred right into his shoulder. Cas fingers didn't let him inspect himself long, reaching around to knead the back of Dean's neck and pull him closer.

Dean reached out to press his palm on Cas' chest, but his breath hitched. The hand that Cas had been pulling him closer with snatched at his wrist. Dean's lips stung at the sudden absence of Cas' pressed against them. Cas' eyes were squeezed shut.

"Cas?"

He turned away, covering his face with his hands. "I'm sorry," Cas croaked, voice muffled. 

"What?"

"I... I said I'm sorry..." Cas muttered.

“Cas. You don’t _ever_ have to be sorry.”

Cas’ shoulders tensed and he dropped his head even lower. At his sides his hands curled into trembling fists. “You don’t know that,” he whispered, voice shaking with awful conviction.

Dean shook his head. “I don’t need to.”

Cas lifted his head perhaps half an inch. Dean reached out to him, tracing a line down his spine with the tip of his index finger. Cas’ skin was so hot that it felt like it was burning him. Cas gasped, arcing up at the touch. Dean laid a palm over the torn and healed mark at the small of Cas’ back and felt him shudder. He dropped his hand.

“I went down to the beach today,” Dean told him. Cas wrapped his arms around himself, shrinking into a slouch. He turned a quarter so that he was standing side on. He had his eyes close. In profile, Dean could see that his eyelashes were so long they brushed his cheekbones. He gulped. “The sea was completely flat. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

A tiny smile played at the corner of Cas mouth. Dean smiled tentatively, too.

“Not that I know much about the sea. I’d never seen it in real life until I joined the marines.”

Cas lifted his head, opening his eyes. “Really?”

“Yeah. It’s crazy. I’d seen pictures and stuff, you know. But the real thing.” Dean shook his head. “I felt so small, you know?”

“It seems endless,” Cas agreed, his voice distant, a thousand miles from his harsh tone before. “There was a guy my dad knew, a trapper.” Dean frowned at the word but Cas’ gaze flickered to him, and he shook his head. “They aren’t all like Luc. At least, this one wasn’t.”

Cas was smiling still but he wasn’t looking at Dean anymore. Or at least, it wasn’t Dean that he was seeing. Cas’ blue gaze seemed as endless as the iron sea. “He had this little boat. He…” Cas blinked, his eyes fluttering. “He took me out on it… he had. He had a son.” Cas screwed up his face again and took a shuddering breath.

Dean wasn’t sure what to say or how to comfort him. The thing Cas couldn’t say wouldn’t come free of the trap. He kept opening his mouth to speak but nothing happened. It wouldn’t run, no matter what Dean did for it. He was eight years old and sobbing, shaking the cage as hard as his matchstick arms would allow but the raccoon wouldn’t budge. His father would wake up soon, he would be angry that Dean had gone and left Sam behind without any breakfast for school. He would have to take the damned stupid raccoon back to the house and his dad would be furious that he’d ever tried to take it away.

“Look at him, Dean!” his father yelled. Sam was standing in the corner of the kitchen, tears on his cheeks. “You’re supposed to look after him!”

“I tried!” Dean yelled. “I did, I tried!”

“Dean,” Cas said firmly. He had one hand on each of Dean’s shoulders. Sam wasn’t there. His dad was dead. Dean was the raccoon. He was all the way out by the ridge and the cage door was open but he couldn’t get free.

Cas frowned. “You’re not a raccoon.”

“What?”

“You said you’re a raccoon.”

“No, the raccoon. He was free but he wouldn’t leave. He wouldn’t _go_ ,” Dean tried to explain desperately. He couldn’t shake his old kitchen out of his head, or Sam’s face, tiny and confused, betrayed by both Dean and his father.

“It’s me. It’s Cas. You’re safe,” Cas whispered. His eyes were so intense, all of their energy focused right on Dean. It was as though Dean hadn’t really been seeing him properly until that moment, and now he’d seen it, the image would be burned into his mind forever. All that he could do was kiss him.


End file.
